POLTERGEIST - Saturday 23rd May 2015.

Back in 1982 Tobe Hooper Directed a film based on a Steven Spielberg story, called 'POLTERGEIST' which he made for US$10.7M and it ended up grossing US$122M and spawned two sequels in 1986 and 1988. The influential Director who had made the cult classic horror film 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' back in 1974 crafted a modern ghost story with a backdrop of a suburban setting involving an everyday young family caught up in terrifying malevolent otherworldly circumstances. Fast forward 33 years, and 'Poltergeist' has been remade for a whole new audience with an insatiable appetite for such scare 'em offerings and who will be largely unfamiliar with the earlier classic horror film of the same name, which I saw last night.

I sat in the movie theatre with what seemed to be an audience of teenagers, and mostly girls who at the required moment let out shrieks, nervous laughs and stilted screams when the horror elements clicked in. Directed this time around by Gil Kenan, with horror master Sam Raimi taking a Producer credit, and with a US$35M budget, I can tell you that there is nothing new to see here!

This updated contemporary offering follows an identical story line - same family unit, same suburban estate, same things that go bump in the night, same paranormal investigators, same root cause of all the spectral shenanigans, and to a large extent same effects. Only the technology has been updated this time to give us smart phones, tablets, flat screen TV's and computer wizardry that shorts out, springs to life of their own accord and pick up static from 'the other side' when you least expect it. Some of the effects have been improved upon as you would expect given the advances in CGI over the last thirty plus years, but none of this does anything to improve on the original!

Our family comprises recently retrenched and out of work Dad Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) who I must say puts in a good turn, his writer wife Amy Bowen (Rosemary DeWitt), and three kids - it's all about me selfish teenage girl brat Kendra (Saxon Sharbino), frightened by his own shadow Griffin (Kyle Catlett) and young six year old innocent Madison (Kennedi Clements). Moving into their new home, things get highly suspicious and irregular from the get go, when the kids at first notice weird things going on about the new homestead. Straight away Griffin want's outta there as he suspects that something ain't quite right.

Sleeping in the attic room with a window skylight directly above his bed and a huge tree whose limbs sway menacingly in the wind directly above that window, Griffin is on edge from the very first night, and even more so when against the moonlight those limbs seem to come alive. Of course that night things do go bump and the ghostly activity starts to manifest itself. It doesn't take long before young Madison is singled out for attention and she starts talking to 'imaginary' friends. The next night having already settled down to a level of domesticity and dismissive of all the unexplained activity as 'rampant imagination' Eric and Amy are invited to a dinner party leaving the kids at home and Kendra baby-sitting. Cue bad shit going down in the house of a thousand ghosts!

Naturally there is a storm outside and as the kids tuck themselves up in bed so a shit storm is unleashed inside that effects all three in different sinister ways. Kendra's new smart phone starts to pick up unexplained static that becomes more clear as she moves around the house and into the garage; the tree outside Griffin's bedroom window springs to life (literally) and crashes in on him, and the clown toys discovered in his room the night before spring to life and attempt to kill him; and Madison is drawn to the TV set and the voices coming from it. With all this mayhem going on Mum and Dad arrive home just in time to save Griffin from death by tree, Kendra from breaking a finger nail, but as for Maddie - she has gone to the netherworld inside the flat screen TV abducted by evil malevolent unseen forces residing therein.

With only Maddie's broken voice emanating from the TV to show she is still alive but someplace else, Amy enlists the support of the local ghostbusters by way of her old University Department of Paranormal Research. They come to the house, rig up their high-tech computer gizmo's to detect activity in every room in the house and pretty soon learn that the place is well & truly possessed! As more bad stuff goes down so more danger is thrown at the resident householders now desperate to cling on to the fading contact they have with Maddie. Enlisting the help of TV celebrity ghost hunter and exorcist Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris) ultimately good overcomes evil but not before they learn that the estate was built 20 years ago on an old cemetery, and whilst the headstones were relocated 20 miles away, the corpses were not! Underneath the house therefore are the disturbed, resentful, mightily pissed off souls of all those who have gone before, now looking for a way out - and Maddie is the one to guide them!

Griffin gets his moment of glory when he goes 'in' to the other world through a portal in Maddie's closet  to retrieve her, and the spectral shit kickers are banished to damnation forever . . . or are they? Of course it doesn't end there and as they strive to leave the house forever, more bad stuff goes down before the house gets torn apart all around them and the dead rise up from the earth beneath. What is interesting to note is that while all this ghostly mayhem and demonic destruction is going on in and around the Bowen house, what of the neighbours, and the guys down the street and the whole estate - nothing else to see there, and the other locals don't even come out to see what the commotion is all about! Strange, but true!

Having seen the 1982 original 'Poltergeist' first at the movies when I was a late teenager, several times subsequently on video, DVD and then the TV, it remains a firm favourite of the genre. This though is a by the numbers facsimile that offers nothing new, is formulaic, predictable and could have been given a whole new take on the story - instead it is a chapter by chapter repeat that suffers as a result. Do yourself a favour and skip paying $20 to see this on the big screen and instead download the original and by far the best 1982 movie - you will be more richly rewarded for it, and twenty bucks better off!

-Steve, at Odeon Online-