Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/5/07
Produced
and co-written by the young Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment
sensibilities were seminal to my childhood movie experience, Poltergeist
was marketed under the tagline “It Knows What Scares You”. It certainly
knew what scared me when I first saw it on HBO at the age of 10.
Closets, your toys sitting there staring at you in the dark, thunderstorms,
and worst of all, old dead trees. Oh, and it's got some ghosts too.
I hadn't seen the film from beginning to end in years, and it's interesting
to watch it with parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as my points
of identification rather than their poor, put-upon kids. But it holds
up surprisingly well, with a loose, frisky spirit and patient faith in
its' subject matter that you wouldn't see in a similar movie today.
Life
is good for the Freeling family, Mom Diane (JoBeth Williams) dotes over
16-year old daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), 8-year old son Robbie (Oliver
Robins) and 5-year-old daughter Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) while Dad
Steve (Craig T. Nelson) is the top home salesman for the ever-expanding
planned community in which they live. But then... Carol Anne comes
wandering down the stairs one night after Steve's fallen asleep in front
of the TV (memo to everyone born in the age of cable: TV stations
used to end their broadcast day between midnight and 3 am with a playing
of the National Anthem and then your set received nothing but static until
the following morning). The little girl (the only member of the family
born in that house) can hear voices in the static: “The TV people”,
she calls them until a spectral bolt shoots out of the TV and she announces
(all together now!) “They're he-ere!” Now begin the strange occurrences.
At first, the unnatural stacking of chairs and dragging of objects (and
people) from one place to another tickles the hell out of Diane, but Steve
is worried. And with good reason: that spooky tree outside
Robbie's window reaches into his room and tries to eat him, distracting
the family while Carol Anne is sucked into the kids' closet. Now
she's part of the spirit world, audible to everyone else on the TV, and
the house is abuzz with paranormal activity. Who're they gonna call?
Paranormal investigators led by Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight), who in turn
call on a medium named Tangina (Zelda Rubenstein). She can help the
Freelings get their daughter back, but to learn the real source of the
haunting, they'll have to look to that unfinished pool in their back yard...
Poltergeist
isn't really a HORROR movie in the conventional sense: Hooper may
have directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and 'Salem's Lot,
but this is Spielberg's show and the film's horrific content is built just
like that of an amusement park spook house. The BOOS! are big and
primal, but it's all in good fun. For all the slime, goo, and characters
imagining themselves tearing the skin off their faces, no one dies, and
the movie ends with a big, cathartic laugh. But it's a great spook
house, even better because it's built out of the pieces of an early 80's
kid's everyday existence. I really love the attention to detail in
the kids' room: all the posters, action figures and dolls are right
out of the time (I had a fair number of them myself): it's not just
“A room” where that creepy clown doll sits, it's “YOUR room”. And
man, did I ever hate those nasty old trees in my neighborhood!
The
actors do a great job of making the Freelings a functioning family that
doesn't feel like they met on the first day of shooting. Nelson and
Williams have smooth, lived-in chemistry, and their easy interplay with
the kids feels perfectly organic. Dunne's Dana is kind of like The
Last 70's Movie Kid, but Robins and especially O'Rourke seem totally unrehearsed
and not at all like the Mini-Adults that pass for kids in most movies today.
Ditto the paranormal investigators who come to check out the house.
Network
Oscar-winner Straight brings real warmth and humanity to Dr. Lesh, and
Richard Lawson and Marty Casella create a convincing feel of two people
just doing their jobs. Then there's Rubenstein, whose Tangina appears
without backstory as a bravura combination of ghost whisperer, televangelist
and huckster. There's no question that the Freelings couldn't be
reunited with their daughter without her, but she's no Obi-Wan Kenobi:
I love the way she's happy to hand off the job of going into the closet
after Carol Anne to Diane, and the way she poses for her money shot before
the investigators' cameras hints at someone with real motivations that
have nothing to do with just loving to fight ghosts. It's simultaneously
a really broad turn and one that fits right in with the quasi-realistic
tone of the rest of the acting.
Poltergeist
was
one of the first movies to incite challenge to the old G-PG-R-X ratings
system, and it's easy to see why. Not only is the scariness and gore
quotient (I did mention that a guy tears his own face off on-screen, didn't
I?) sky-high for little kids, but it's absolutely hilarious how morally
transgressive the day-to-day existence of the Freelings is for a PG movie.
Dana's sleeping around and getting ogled by teamsters at 16, and Mom smokes
pot (and rolls her own joint) on-screen. It's interesting to look
at the world on-screen and think of how the movies' depiction of real life
has either backslid or advanced (depending upon your point of view) in
the intervening quarter-century.
So,
what else has changed in 25 years? The characters are certainly much
more willing to take a break, sit around the living room and talk about
where they stand than they'd ever be in a modern movie. Product placement
has obviously made strides: while directors today would be just as
happy to shove a bag of Lays in your face as Hooper is, I'd imagine that
it might now actually look like it had once had chips in it rather than
being so meticulously flattened out so everyone can read the name on it.
And
then there are the special effects. I was surprised to see how many
of them can actually hold their heads high, from that voracious tree to
the vicious spider-ghost who blocks the door to the kids' room at the end.
The way everything that enters the closet comes out of the living room
ceiling all slimy is a wonderful visual touch. On the other hand,
it's funny to watch the old-fashioned stop-motion animation that sends
objects flying around the room (not that I'm sure it would look much better
with today's techniques), and the FX (pretty much identical to the ones
in a similar scene in The Terminator) that allow Marty to tear his
face off are laughably fake (but that's probably a good thing).
Poltergeist
is an evolutionary step toward the modern summer movie. The “one
damn thing after another” climax sets a tone movies now too often try to
ape from beginning to end. But it's also got a lot of heart, and
it's really interested in the people caught in the gears of its' plot.
The film holds up very well today, even for those of us too old to worry
about what happens when we close our closet doors at night. |
