There is not much to be said about this remake of Tobe Hooper’s / Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic. It is done as well as you would expect, made for an audience that has not seen the original 20 times and developed a love for creepy-tiny Carol-Ann and creepy-also-tiny Lady Tangina. I would expect a young audience to find this 2015 edition sufficiently scary, I was myself thinking that there are some scenes that are done very well, especially at the beginning, when odd things start happening.
But then again, this script is like a check list of the old one, and ticking the boxes gets a bit arduous and actually a tad boring too. The tv set, check. “They are heeeere”, check. The clown, check. The tree, check. The bodies from the graveyard, check. The hole into another dimension and the rope through it, check. The one aspect where the makers of Poltergeist 2015 developed some ideas of their was the look of what lies behind the closet, the look of that other dimension into which Carol-Ann… sorry: Maddy gets abducted. There are ven three seconds of brilliance, when Maddy is seen face-down from the perspective of an overturned car, and she calmly states “Something is not right”, before not-so-good things happen. Oh, and Sam Rockwell is good, but then again, he almost always is…
The other issue is that Poltergeist was already a rather late addition to the spooked house genre, and some decades later, I think there is not much you can do with this. Never mind that it was all there in the original: You shouldn’t do such a straightforward Haunted House movie in 2015, if any at all. It just wears off..
All in all, an addition to the catalogue of unnecessary remakes, even though it kept me kind of entertained for an hour and a half. .
thomas4cinema 