Poltergeist

The obvious question, when it comes to Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist remake, is why? Why does this movie exist, exactly? If you want to be a smartass, you can say that about every movie, but this is especially pronounced when we talk about a movie as superfluous and bland and unimaginative as this version of Poltergeist. This movie exists to make money, and not on any of its own merits, but because it shares a title with a movie that was popular three decades ago, with the same (though mildly updated) plot. It doesn’t exist as art or as entertainment (at least, if this movie was supposed to exist as entertainment, it failed), meaning it went about making money in the most tedious and boring ways imaginable.

And I’m not even a fan of the original Poltergeist (1982), nor am I necessarily averse to remakes or reboots on principle. It’s my belief that if a director is worth his or her salt, something good (or at the very least interesting) will come out of any project they work on. So in theory, at least, Poltergeist has the foundation of being entertaining since Kenan’s made one really solid, really fun haunted house caper in the past with the animated adventure Monster House (2006). The problem is that Monster House is what Poltergeist should’ve been — in a word, fun. Instead, what remains is a movie that’s too geared toward adults to have the necessary amount of flippancy and imagination to be truly fun, and too enamored with the family friendly nature of the original and keeping a PG-13 rating to be scary. Poltergeist falls apart at the seams in this respect, just wallowing in mediocrity with no identity of its own.

This last part is a major problem, since the film follows the original Poltergeist extremely closely. A family moves into a house, finds out it’s haunted and loses their youngest daughter (Kenndi Clements) to one angry spirit who drags her through a portal to purgatory. It’s up to the family to figure out a way of getting her back. All Kenan and company manage to do with the story is update it vaguely — now there are iPads and GPS tracking devices and reality TV shows, window dressing that doesn’t really add to or comment on the original. On top of this, the stakes have been raised since the original film was released. Compare it to a film like James Wan’s Insidious (2010), which has a similar plot but is more cognizant of its genre, its history and its cliches. Poltergeist cares nothing for this, instead ignoring 33 years of horror filmmaking to just make the same movie over again. And it doesn’t work because there are better movies to compare the concept to now. Just look at the cartoony CGI netherworld Poltergeist trots out compared to the genuinely creepy and eccentric one in Insidious and you get an idea of how Kenan’s film wants to cut all the corners. Rated PG-13 for intense frightening sequences, brief suggestive material and some language.