Hate for Poltergeist

Hate for Poltergeist? Really?

I thought it was decent...some really good moments...although now I find it hard to take Craig T. Nelson seriously.

C'mon...the clown scene still leaves me with crapplesauce in my pants.

it blew me away when I saw it in the theaters


now I see.....things that don't match

horrible horrible things happen in the house, but later they see angelic type ghosts float down the stairs and everyone enjoys a cookie in friendship




and what was that doggie chew toy the tv shot onto the wall??

I like cookies

You're gonna pick on the cookies? Blame them for all the problems?

NOW who's the monster?

Oh boy, you're gonna make me do this, huh? ;-) Okay, putting my flame retardant suit on now.

Here goes.

This was one of those movies that I saw as a kid and loved. Watching it a bit later on, my enjoyment was lessened. I saw it again recently and detested it. Just hearing little Carol Ann intone "They're heeere" makes me cringe, because it's such an obvious tagline. Indeed, most of the dialogue is inane -- particularly that between Jobeth Williams (whose incessant shrieks throughout the movie become utterly grating) and Craig T. Nelson. It's just there to give that faux Suburban happy family vibe that Spielberg had already done to death in E.T.

Ah, Spielberg, the king of safe, kid-friendly genre flicks. Sure, Tobe Hooper is credited with direction, but if all stories of this movie's production are to be believed, Hooper directed about two scenes. And it shows in the movie's poorly shifting tones. The one moment that I know came from Hooper (the guy tearing off chunks of his face) fits so poorly with the Spielberg brand of schmaltzy whiz-bang wonder that it may as well exist in a different movie.

But with Spielberg onboard, this is just the quintessential overloaded FX movie. Since the pacing is so off, it's jazzed up by so many over the top fx sequences that it just becomes plodding. Getting bored? Well, here's some whizbang fx trickery to keep your eyes busy. To me, it comes off as a hollow lightshow mixed with some extremely goofy new age ghost ramblings. The FX consistenly overwhelm the story, killing off any real tension you might feel for the Freeling family (who are so poorly developed that the oldest daughter just disappears from the screen for half the movie). Sure, there are some hints of good scares, but they're quickly derailed. The clown bit is at first creepy, but then it's immediately in the kid's face, cackling wildly. The kid's fear of the gnarled, threatening tree is spooky until the ridiculous moment when it smashes through the window and tries to eat him. And then we have gaping mouths in walls, giant ectoplasmic creatures and lovely spirits made of light that show up just in time to make everyone go "oooh" and "ahhhh" in a blatant attempt to tug the heartstrings. It's so calculated and melodramatic that it induces laughs.

There's no subtlety or craft here, just bombastic, in your face sequences. This is the ultimate hollow, big budget fx-loaded event movie.

It basically amounts to the remake of The Haunting done in 1982 (and isn't it interesting that Spielberg produced both?)...a safe, overdone spectacle that will keep the kids entertained but have the adults yawning.

I watched all of the POLTERGEIST flicks years ago and whole I dug a few scenes the movies (even the first) were not serious and nasty enough for me. They had that while Spielbergian playfulness them, very much like horror flicks for the whole family or something like that. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it's definitely not my kind of thing.

Iagree with the Spielberg opinion.

The whole movie reeks of the "Spielberg Touch."

all I know is DON'T FUCK WITH INDIAN GRAVEYARDS!!!!



I bet amish ghosts would make you furniture and blue cheese

Heh, Bob, the only thing that has ruined this movie is time. Honestly, I was shocked at how poorly it's aged. As for Spielberg being a master manipulator, I agree to some extent -- but this is a case where the various parts of a film just crash into one another, leaving nothing but shoddy debris all over the place.

The masterful Close Encounters shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence.

As for The Haunting, Spielberg was heavily involved in that as well. A shame, since his most recent work has shown a new level of maturity.

(now wearing adamantium-laced junkbox armor)

The "mouth in the wall" was awesome. But my favorite part had to be at the end when they went to a motel and rolled the TV outside.

Oooh, one more thing to add. What the fuck is going on with Zelda Rubinstein's clumsily-written character? I've never gotten that whole "run to the light...run away from the light" stuff straight.

Her obvious attempts to steal the show are just painful.

Blah, I say. Blah!

:The "mouth in the wall" was awesome.

And that's the point. There are plenty of fx moments that make you go "hey, that's pretty cool." But there aren't any plot or character moments that make you do that at all.

I always liked the pool with the dead doing the adult swim part

Well I'm going to go against the grain and say that I really don't think that Spielberg 'directed' Poltergeist. Sure it has his touch on it but that's shown off more in his screenplay and Hooper was just going with that.

If I remember rightly, Hooper has never confirmed those rumours, but instead said it was an over zealous reporter who ran with this story and everyone believed it. It begs the question that why, if Hooper had it so rough, did he and Spielberg propose their sequel to the studio, only to have it turned down? Both men were perfectly willing to work with eachother again - not the actions taken by two guys who butted heads throughout the production.

Funnily enough - those hands belong to Speilberg. And I'll have to check my script (My god I'm such a geek) but I'm pretty sure that Spielbergo wrote that scene as well.

Interesting, because when I saw Hooper speak several years ago, he simply refused to speak on the subject, saying that there was no need to dredge up anything from that era of his life. Everything I've ever heard on the subject has it that Hooper's personal problems (drugs) and radical approach led to Spielberg taking the reigns.

And really, all you have to do is compare it to the two directors' canons. It doesn't remotely resemble much of anything that Hooper's done. And it feels like MANY things Spielberg's done.

The film speaks for itself.

I guess it's nostalgia, I loved this movie as a kid and think it's still fun. But heres the one thing that seems off to me: the oldest girl, Dana is 16 but the mother is only 32. Yes, I know lots of women have kids at or before 16, but it's just always seemed odd to me that Spielberg threw that in there because that was really frowned upon in that time period.

Pre-martial teen age sex frowned upon in 1982! Balderdash! Piffle I say to you.

Ah, to have experienced the joys of sex in a pre-Aids world. How I pity the young people of today.

Well, the Dana character comes off as such an afterthought in the film that I wouldn't be surprised if she was thrown in by Spielberg or the studio in an attempt to give the teen audience some sort of anchor.

In a horrific turn of real-life events, the actress, Dominique Dunne was actually murdered by her nutso boyfriend shortly after the film's release.

When the sequel rolled around a few years later, her character was (of course) written out -- but not really. She's just not there, and the family never mentions her, as if she never existed.

You know, as much as I'm bashing the original movie, I'll at least give it some props for eyecandy, something the two rockbottom sequels can't even boast.

She's in Spielberg's script but not too much. She pretty much has nothing to do in there either. I think the Berg wanted a family unit but really only concentrated on fleshing out the 2 younger kids.

Hooper swears up and down the Spielberg had virtually nothing to do with the direction, but did help out on the set occasionally. It's a sore subject for him, since he says that everyone credits Spielberg for the movie because of those rumors.

And if you had seen Lifeforce, I'm surprised you would assert that it was necessarily Spielberg's idea to have all of the glitzy special effects and light shows. Besides, I don't think that Spielberg over-uses special effects. It's not like Amistad or the Color Purple had glowing lights abducting children. Yes, there are a lot of special effects in Poltergeist, but there are plenty of haunting movies that have absolutely none, so I didn't mind the change of pace. That fact was even an important point of the story line (the parapsychologists are commenting on filming a car roll across the ground over the course of several hours, just to be introduced to Carol Ann's bedroom chaos).

I also don't find the scene with the face-peeling inconsistent with the rest of the film. There are several instances in the movie where Hooper is trying to disturb you visually, be it with maggot-meat, evil clowns, man-eating trees, demon ghosts, corpses rising from the grave, or whatever.

And, ultimately, their "family bond" was one of the central elements of the film, so it makes sense that it would have the "family vibe." The movie expressed in many scenes the importance of their "love" for each other in dealing with this situation, so it certainly wasn't a subtle plotline.

And, as far as the 16-year-old daughter goes, she flips out, which is quite understandable under the circumstances. I would've sent her off too, under the same circumstances. Besides, you don't want to water the movie down by focusing on too many characters, and it made for a nice "family reunion" at the end of the film.

I loved Poltergeist, and think it is one of the quintessential haunting films of all time.

dmeister

so, no one can explain the ghostly chew toy on the wall???


one scene it's there.....then it crawled away....I guess



WHAT WAS IT!!??!>!>>!/?

Wait a minute...that was a mouth?

It looked like a...

Just to add my two bits to the Hooper/Spielberg topic.... there is a book on Spielberg (Forgot the name).... with a set picture from Poltergeist.

On the far left is Steven pointing to Craig T. Nelson, who is standing far right...

... and in the middle is Tobe, looking all bearded and pissed off.

The caption on the picture is : "Steven Spielberg directing Tobe Hooper directing Craig T. Nelson."

And after seeing all of Tobe's grim output over the past 30 years, I would have to agree it's Spielberg's film.... and I also believe that the real creative force behind "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was director of photography Daniel Pearl.

People who think poltergeist is just a shiny happy spileberg movie aren't looking at the subtext.

Poltergeist is the mirror image of ET. In the film all the values that are espoused in ET are turned on their head to nightmarish effect.

The childish imagination abd innate innocence, a wellspring of wonderment in ET, in poltergeist that innocence becomes a thing to be exploited and twisted by forces of evil.

The idyllic nuclear family longed for in ET is, in poltergeist, a somewhat corrupted unit, one that encompasses drugs and dysfunctional apathy (the older daughter is so apathetic to he family she doesn't even know what is going on when she finally returns home)

The television, a benign and educating tool in ET, is now a hypnotic vortex to the netherworld.

And the neighborhgood situated on anindian burial ground and an old graveyard, unlike ET's tract-housing playground of bike trails and welcoming woods, is a symbol of both 1980's materialist, me-first greed, and a reminder of the old atrocities that lie at the root of modern american society.

Both films are about the secret world of children. ET is the blissful dream, Poltergeist is the nightmare. Its subtext is savage.

well....they were smoking the cronic and talking about their hippy days in the film




the more I think about the chew toy the television set put on the wall, the deeper the mystery goes, and the level of my aggravation goes up up UP

Poltergeist is a great film. I have not seen it in about five or six years, but I always liked it and have fond memories. HMMM, maybe I will go and rent it again...

I was going to give you this point, but then I thought, wasn't Hooper a little more well known at this point? I mean he wasn't the DTV machine he is now but surely he had some clout around this time? The way the story was told was that Hooper and Spielberg came up with a concept for a sequel (About a team that follow the hole where the house was swallowed up) but it was rejected because it wasn't another 'Poltergeist' movie as such. Then Paramount came up with their own idea for the sequel and Hooper and Spielberg backed down.

Then Hooper made 'Lifeforce' and everything went to shit.

The corpses in the pool--scary.

"They're heeere!" with the ghost hand out of the TV, years before Sadako/Samara--fucking scary.

The clown doll--really fucking scary.

But for me, strangely, the scariest part was a quiet scene, where Jobeth cleans the table or something ,goes to the kitchen for an instant, comes back seconds later and finds all the chairs stacked in a pyramid on the table. No sound, not nearly enough time, totally surreal and impossible:



One of the many things this movie got right. I like it.

As for the poorly-written midget, I just thought she was a bad actress.