To see how outraged I should be

We all complain about remakes and reboots and long-delayed sequels. I mean, everyone. The trend has gotten so ridiculous that even that mythical Dumbest Member of the Viewing Public probably has some sacred cow whose legacy has been just watered down enough through an uninspired remake that it's made him grumpy.

Yet many of us continue to see them anyway. Even when we know better. Even when there are plenty of other options to watch at our fingertips at any given moment of the day.

Why?

It's not enough to assume they fucked it up. We want to know how badly they fucked it up.

Which was pretty much my reason for watching the Poltergeist remake last night.

Since I still cite the original Poltergeist as perhaps the scariest movie I've ever seen -- and I'm speaking purely of my capacity to handle it at the age I saw it, not objectively the most disturbing -- I was perhaps even more curious about what kind of sacrilege they put up on screen in the 2015 remake. And part of that curiosity was, of course, a dim hope that it was worthwhile. Some of the basic elements of that film still bother me enough that a smart update of them could have had the same effect.

Gil Kenan's 2015 version of Poltergeist does not have smart updates of anything. As perhaps a single symbol of what grounds a timeless concept thuddingly in our present tense, the paranormal investigators send a drone into that ectoplasmic void in the upstairs closet. I tell you now from having seen it -- nothing I can think of is less scary than a drone. (Unless you're a terrorist or a civilian scampering around on the ground in a Middle Eastern country, of course.)

The new Poltergeist tries to hit the same story beats as the original, but it hits them with such a lethargy that it highlights just how perfunctory the whole affair is. For example, screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire decides he has to give a shout out to the clown scene from the original and the tree scene from the original, so he puts them both in the same scene. Both sequences are directed by Kenan with such little flair that what makes a living tree and a living clown so frightening are almost completely lost. Which is a real shame, because Kenan directed the clever and scary animated film Monster House (which my son calls "Spooky House"), making him an obvious candidate for this job, and Lindsay-Abaire wrote a movie I absolutely love, Rabbit Hole ... making him not such an obvious candidate for this job, but also making him someone who should be able to write a better script.

Then there are the very minor alterations of things that happen in the original. The absolutely terrifying scene in the original in which that paranormal investigator sees maggots in his chicken and then starts tearing off his face is handled this time with Sam Rockwell's paterfamilias having the episode instead. But instead of the practical effect biological realism of the face-tearing incident, it's a predictably CG affair where he spews black tar-like liquid into a sink and sees CG worms in it. Bo-ring.

I will grant that even a PG-13 rating today is not what a PG rating was back then, so that accounts for some of the toned-down nature of that incident. Another way this Poltergeist is sanitized for the 21st century is that the parents, played in the original so memorably with such mutual affection and joie de vivre by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, don't of course smoke weed in their bedroom after the kids go to sleep. No one is getting away with that shit in 2015. However, we need to know that Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt are cool, so instead they drink wine out of coffee mugs. Bo-ring.

CG really does this movie in, putting too fine a point on things that were scary for their minimalism back in the original. Of course we get Carol Anne at the TV again (she's called Madison this time), but where we thought we heard distant whispering in that static originally, we couldn't really be sure. The thing that was creepy about it was that Carol Anne was talking to the TV, validating those sounds we heard as the sounds of ghostly whispers. This time, however, Kenan thinks it's a good idea to have the girl touch the TV and have a hand come back from the other side. Then the screen fills up with hands. Might I find this scary if I hadn't seen the original? No way to tell, but I don't think so. She also repeats the line "They're here," but without wanting to directly imitate Heather O'Rourke saying "They're heeEEEEeere," she just spits out the words dully. As if everyone involved just knows this is a soulless enterprise, and going through the motions is the best approach they can imagine.

Don't even get me started on all the CGI ghouls they see when they send the drone into the void. I'd say I'd seen it in a thousand films before, but I actually think it's been thousands, plural.

In short, Poltergeist is exactly what a person would expect, and to even enumerate its sins as I've just done suggests I was expecting it to be something else. I shouldn't have been, and if I was, I was a fool.

So maybe I've enumerated its sins just to save you the trouble of watching it yourself in order to determine how badly they fucked it up.

The most quotable line from Poltergeist ... II

One movie reference that has persisted for years in our culture is the notion that something is "baaAAAaack."

That's how I write it whenever I use it, anyway. I've seen it written as either "ba-ack" or just "baaaaack," the latter hoping, I guess, that you will imagine the vowel sound going up in that sing-songy fashion without any visual cues to indicate it.

This is, of course, the ominous pronouncement of one Carol Anne Freeling upon realizing that the Poltergeist ghosts have returned to her television. She announced their original arrival with "They're heeEEEeere."

But the meme that has persisted in our culture is not "They're heeEEEeere." It's "They're baaAAAaack." It is most often used to describe the return of someone or something that we'd thought was, practically speaking, dead. I used it most recently to describe Boston Red Sox hitter Shane Victorino, a former star who has suffered through a panoply of injuries and ineffective play over the past two seasons, who hit a home run and led his team to victory on Thursday. (A friend of mine is obsessed with Victorino.) That was a decent usage, but it's better for (staying in the world of baseball) someone like Alex Rodriguez, who missed all of last season after an infamous steroid suspension but has been playing like gangbusters early on in 2015. It should really be for someone you hoped was gone, but now is back -- like those Poltergeist ghosts.

Of course, it's not actually from Poltergeist. It's from Poltergeist II.

When you think about it, it makes sense. It was the perfect marketing hook for a Poltergeist sequel, playing off the most famous quote from the original movie. What's odd is that it has risen up above the original quote in prominence and frequency of usage, even as the second Poltergeist movie on the whole is justifiably forgotten and dismissed.

For example, did you even remember, without seeing that poster, that Poltergeist II was subtitled The Other Side?

Alright, that one was too easy. Yeah, you remembered.

But it's funny that when we think we're doing "the Poltergeist quote," we're actually doing "the Poltergeist II quote." It's kind of the same as that time I discovered that most of my friends and my favorite quotes from Airplane! were actually from Airplane II -- although not really the same, because Airplane II is also really funny. Whereas Poltergeist II ... well, that old guy at the beginning really scared me, anyway.

I haven't seen any advertising for this summer's Poltergeist reboot, but I imagine that, also, would be a good opportunity for "They're baaAAAaack." Of course, "they" can never really be back in a soulless reboot that is as likely to scare me as it's likely to do my taxes.

R for feaR, or "If I were 13 I'd piss my pants"

The most sustained period of dread I've ever experienced in a movie theater was back in the mid-1980s, when I saw Poltergeist during what must have been a re-release. (I was young, but there was no way I was only eight, when the film had its first run in 1982.)

What I remember was of course fear, but more than that was the feeling that I couldn't escape from it -- that it surrounded me. It was not only the current fear, and the fear I'd already had, but the sense of the fear I still had waiting for me. I remember feeling a distinct sense of relief during the sequence in the middle of the night, when nothing is terrorizing the living hell out of the family and they just sit there, bonding in hushed whispers. I knew for at least five or ten minutes, I could relax.

The PG-13 rating did not yet exist when Poltergeist came out, but I really wish it had been there to save me. I was too young to see Poltergeist, even if I now consider it the top horror experience of my long and distinguished career.

Just as today, I think the R rating should have saved some 13-year-olds who weren't much dissuaded by Mama's measly PG-13.

Simply put, this is a scary fucking movie. At times, anyway.

But movies are not rated based on how likely they are to scare you. Movies get an R because of explicit sex, violence or language. (Which means that this post has already done enough to earn an R.) Mama has none of these things, but it can still scare the living shit out of a person.

A person over 17, methinks.

It makes me wonder whether the MPAA follows the letter of its own laws, but not the spirit.

If the point of a rating is to prevent children from being traumatized by things they shouldn't see, then the MPAA needs to give itself the leeway to be more flexible. I didn't think you'd ever see me advocating more stodginess on the part of the MPAA, but here I am.

The MPAA needs to have a sort-of sniff test about what should get an R. Yeah, I know they've got generic descriptors like "intense images" and "graphic images" and "adult content," but do they use them? It would seem like Mama would have been a perfect chance to do so.

You probably want to know at this point why I think Mama is so scary. Why don't I let the short film that Andy (Andres) Muschietti wrote and directed, before expanding it into a feature, speak for itself:

Were you a little chilled by that? Were you a lot chilled by that? Do you think at age 13 you'd want to watch that?

Now imagine a whole movie of that. And imagine feral children who scamper across the ground like spiders.

I suppose that Mama is not nearly the only example of a disturbing horror movie that got the lenient PG-13 rating, which provides almost no obstacle to maximum potential box office grosses, but it's the first movie I've seen that I remember causing me to wonder whether it wouldn't be just too much to handle for the average 13-year-old. And don't forget that those younger than 13 are almost certain to see it. The PG-13 rating is as much a guideline as anything, and I'm sure 10-year-olds are finding their way into this movie.

Let me pause in my prudish stance to assure you of something: I am not in the least critical of Mama itself. In fact, Mama scared me like I haven't been scared in the theater in some time. Even if the film weren't exceptionally crafted and acted, that alone would prompt me to give it a full recommendation.

I just wonder if the nearly 40-year-olds of 2040 won't be wondering whether they should have seen Mama when they did.

Then again, if they loved it as much as I (ultimately) loved Poltergeist, maybe that won't be a bad thing.

Up and running

Mama is the first movie I've seen released in 2013, which means I've just finished creating my two new Microsoft Word documents devoted to the films I see in 2013.

Always a fun moment. Glad to be back on the horse after putting 2012 to bed.

The Chastain Wing

Upon coming out of the theater where I saw Mama last night, I noticed that the only other movie playing in that wing of the theater was Zero Dark Thirty.

Making that the Jessica Chastain Wing of the theater.

And this wing shows you just how much this woman can really do. If you popped back and forth between these two theaters, you'd get the same terrific cheekbones and the same determined chin. But the Chastains you'd see would be entirely different.

In Zero Dark Thirty, you get Maya, an intensely focused CIA officer who is hellbent on finding the world's most wanted terrorist. She's headstrong and she plays with the big boys, but there's something hesitant about her, a softness at her core that leaves her not-so-secretly squeamish at what she and her government have to do to find Osama bin Laden. She's the consummate professional and she dresses the part, her fiery red hair acting as the sole sartorial hint of her rebelliousness.

In Mama, you get Annabel, a tattoed rock chick whose dark brown hair is cropped short with bangs at the front. She plays guitar in a hard rock band that might dabble in metal, though she wears Ramones t-shirts, tipping off her punk influences. She's tough and unsentimental, yet she demonstrates the same seriousness of purpose as Maya -- she won't abandon her boyfriend (boyfriend only!) when he decides to adopt his two nieces, who have spent the last five years living in a cabin in the woods.

Damn, can Chastain act.

Don't read this section if you haven't yet seen Mama

But then come back and read it once you've seen the movie. Don't forget!

It's a pretty common tactic to end a horror or thriller with the wounded survivors huddled together and finally safe, having survived their ordeal, knowing on some level that what lies ahead of them will be comparatively smooth sailing.

Not in Mama.

Oh yeah, the movie ends that way. But the future sailing hardly seems likely to be smooth.

For starters, you've got the minor detail that one of the two sisters dies. Although it's not spelled out in so many words, that's what the ending implies, and you have no good reason not to believe it. So, there's that.

But then what about the other dead bodies?

The therapist who had focused his entire career on the two feral girls has been killed, and so has their aunt, who actually fought their uncle (a brother, not an ex-husband) for their custody. How are you going to explain that to the cops, since there isn't a shred of evidence of the corporeal spirit who actually did the killings?

Add to that the fact that their uncle, who survives the ordeal, is the brother of a man who was wanted for murdering three people five years earlier, and was widely considered to have had a mental breakdown. This guy and his punk rock girlfriend are still going to be able to keep the surviving girl, even though the events that transpired (including the death of one of the girls) would have only confirmed the general suspicion that a judge was wrong to leave the kids in these people's hands in the first place?

So yeah, good luck with rest of your lives, folks.

My scariest movie

Somewhere along the way, I forgot exactly how much Poltergeist had scared the pants off me when I was a kid.

Monday night's Halloween viewing -- my first in a decade or longer -- reminded me quite effectively.

In fact, I now recall that when I saw it in the theater as a child, I emerged thinking that my parents should not have let me see it.

I mean, who says that? If anything, it's the other way around -- you always think your parents are being overprotective.

But if I saw it on its initial run, I would have been only nine years old -- possibly only eight years old. It's more likely I saw it on a re-release, maybe a couple years later. But it surely wasn't more than a couple years later, leaving me no older than 12 at the time.

It's fair to say I was haunted by Poltergeist for weeks. And it wasn't just the iconic imagery I don't need to remind you of here. I believe I saw it at a time when I was struggling with the concept of death for the first time, so I was even disturbed by things like Carol Ann's bird dying. (Which, incidentally, is the only "character" who dies in the whole movie -- and since the bird actually dies off screen before the narrative begins, you could say that the Poltergeist body count is actually zero.)

Zero dead bodies, in what may be the scariest movie I have ever seen.

(You don't count those corpses in the swimming pool, either, because they died years ago.)

At some point over the years, however, my perspective on Poltergeist changed from "that movie scared the shit out of me" to the more dispassionate "that movie is an effective horror classic, which perfectly encapsulates the Spielberg-ian themes of small-town USA turned on its head."

Monday night reminded me how much more intimate and immediate and primitive it really is.

Even though I would guess that was my fifth time seeing the movie, I still spent a large part of the movie in chills. Neither were the regular, intense chills my only physiological reaction to the movie. During the film's emotional climax, I felt myself get choked up several times -- and not even the times you'd think I'd get choked up, like the touching scene of ectoplasm-soaked reunion between the Freeling parents and their daughter, somehow still intact in her corporeal form, in the family bathtub. The rest of the time, the sheer intensity of it was enough to push tears to the brims of my eyelids. The climax has the same kind of tension as the end of Raiders ("Don't look at it Marion! Keep you're eyes shut!") with a ton more emotional involvement. Simply put, it slayed me.

But the emotional climax is not the end of the movie.

And here's where Poltergeist goes sort of wrong.

As I was watching the first 3/4 of Poltergeist, I was asking myself if this movie deserves to be considered among my top 20 films of all time. It's that good. Sure, the scares and tension are sustained with the skill of a master, but as good as that are the subtleties that allow you to believe these characters and instantly immerse yourself in their lives. One of my favorite scenes is our first real introduction to the parents, when they're talking casually in bed. Diane is smoking a joint (love the casualness of her drug use, which never makes you think she's a bad parent) while Steven is pantomiming a dive off the bed in the master bedroom. Their interactions are so natural, and you immediately believe that this is a real married couple who are, quite wonderfully, still delighted with each other after 15 or so years of marriage. I also love that when she first discovers that they might have ghosts, she's overjoyed just to be able to demonstrate a chair moving on its own from their kitchen into their dining room. She jumps up and down like an excited cheerleader. The movie has no need to go through all the machinations of various characters not believing that the house might be haunted -- it's got bigger fish to fry, and wants to get on to frying them.

For the record, my Flickchart ranking is still very generous -- I have it ranked 59th out of 3319 films. But the reason I don't have it ranked higher is the dubious third act.

Now granted, some of the things we remember most from Poltergeist occur in those last 20-25 minutes. But that doesn't mean there isn't a structural problem with this script. The real emotional climax is when the miniature mystic (played wonderfully by Zelda Rubinstein) does battle with "the beast" and coaxes Carol Ann back to the world of the living with the assistance of an exceptionally brave mother and father. But the movie is not over by then, not by a long shot.

The last section of the movie, after the primary tension of Carol Ann's survival has already been deflated, feels like a grab bag of things they wanted to get in somewhere. Let's suppose they shot the scenes chronologically, although that almost certainly didn't happen. It's like either Steven Spielberg or Tobe Hooper (more likely Spielberg) gathered the crew together and said "Wait! We still have to do that bit with the clown. And the bit where Jobeth climbs the walls of her bedroom. Oh, and the part with the corpses in the swimming pool. Shit, let's not forget the part where the coffins pop out of the ground. And that mouth we drew up in the bedroom closet -- that thing's awesome, we have to do it. Oh! And I almost forgot the skeletal beast that prevents Diane from entering her kids' bedroom. Guys, we've still got to fit all this in."

And Steven, don't forget the part where the house crumples up into a ball like a piece of notebook paper, and tumbles away into oblivion.

Perhaps the best example of the filmmakers' misunderstanding of how to play the last act is when the daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), returns home and screams "WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?" A great individual shot that must have been gangbusters in the trailers. But the fact remains that when she speaks this line, her entire family is in a car right behind her, about to permanently escape harm for the final time. All tension has pretty much dissipated at the point of the movie's most bat-shit crazy line.

However, I don't want your lingering impression of this piece to be that I have real criticisms with Poltergeist. It's still the movie that left me in a constant state of dread more than any other. I remember how much I loved the scene in the middle of the night at the house, when the team of paranormal investigators are first monitoring the house's spiritual activity. No one's really asleep but everyone is quiet, and they connect with each other in hushed, whispered conversations. I remember grabbing on to that wonderful scene as a lifeboat in the midst of terrifying chaos.

For at least one, fleeting moment, everyone was safe.