Well, it's not like it was an ancient tribal burial ground.

Poltergeist

(2015)

MGM’s ransacking of their archives for properties to remake to negligible response, other than sullying their reputation through wanton disrespect, might not seem that heinous in respect of Poltergeist. It was, after all, the spooky equivalent of Jaws. A Spielberg concept “directed by Tobe Hooper”, run into the ground through neglect and the desire for artistically bankrupt sequels. But Gil Kenan’s update is so wilfully redundant, particularly when the original had something special going for it, it might be worth keeping the 2015 take in mind as a harbinger of what will become of many an ‘80s classic (well, there are only so many ‘80s classics to start with, but you get the idea) when their master architects are no longer around to put the kibosh on suits’ plans to jump-start a brand.

MGM’s plundering hasn’t produced anything anyone’s sat up and taken notice of, and none of them have felt like a prestige or event picture, from Carrie to Robocop to Fame to Red Dawn. And with a ho-hum speed-ramped Ben-Hur and a Fuqua’d The Magnificent Seven to come this year, and Road House and another Thomas Crown Affair in the pipeline, that doesn’t look like it’s going to change very soon. There was some vague hope for Poltergeist. After all, Sam Raimi was attached as producer, who had garnered respect for shepherding various horror properties to the screen (mostly remakes of Japanese fare). And Kenan seemed to have the right sensibility. Monster House was well-regarded, and his live-action debut, City of Ember was under-seen but suggested he wouldn’t have to return to expressing himself purely via pixels any time soon.

Poltergeist, though, as suggested by the limp attempts to update it for a generation 30-years on, brings little new to the table, particularly arriving as it does in the shade of James Wan’s more effective series of family-shockers. Maybe that’s down to David Lindsay-Abaire’s antiseptic screenplay (he also contributed to the less than impressive adaptations of Rise of the Guardians and Oz The Great and Powerful; the latter suggests he impressed Raimi, but I can’t think why, given the end result), or maybe it’s just a general lack of confidence given the original’s insurmountable iconography.

The closest we come is in the depiction of the parents, whose own domestic disturbance is far more engaging than the frightful occurrences (he’s out of work, demanding she stay at home to complete that novel, although really it’s about his insecure breadwinner status). Indeed, when Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt (another reason to have looked to the picture’s potential, as they’re excellent choices) are on screen, before they’re bowdlerised by the incessant un-special effects of the last half hour, you might almost believe Poltergeist is heading some place interesting. Rockwell’s never one to play a normal guy, but that makes his efforts to be an understanding dad and gracious husband more marked, leading to a memorable sequence of gross immaturity as he embarks on a spending spree with his one non-maxed-out credit card. DeWitt has less to do, but she tends to make you forget when she’s doing it.

The kids aren’t as successful, though. Kyle Catlett, the lead in The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, comes across like he’s just stepped out of a new Kenan CGI animation, and where his oddball quality worked in Spivet, here it just tends to mark the movie out as cartoonish and ungrounded even before anything strange has happened. Saxon Sharbino is just another teenage daughter, and Kennedi Clements, essaying the “They’re here!” role, is insufficiently supported by gradually escalating strangeness so her plight lacks any impact.

Which is the biggest problem. The picture unfolds in such a functional, mechanical manner in respect of the supernatural element, it neither surprises nor scares anybody. Tree scene? Check. TV set (big TV set)? Check. Gateway to another realm, but now with copious, bland CGI? Check. Jared Harris offers some relief as smooth showman ghostbuster Carrigan Burke, full of war stories and bearing the demeanour of a faker, and Jane Adams offers contrasting gravitas as the earnest faculty professor on hand, but by this point the picture can only play out its store in undemanding, unconvincing fashion.

When we arrive at the house kidnapping the family car, for yet more CGI-assisted attempts at a top-that finale, there’s still ten minutes to go, and it’s a snooze. One might hope this would impede the studio’s will to remake its back catalogue, since none of them thus far have really been worth the effort, but if there’s any chance of just one landing, you know they’ll take it.

Comments

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

‘Cos I’m the gringo who always delivers.

American Made (2017)
(SPOILERS) This is definitely more the sort of thing Tom Cruise should be doing, a movie that relies both on his boyish™ charm and at least has pretensions of ever so slightly pushing the envelope of standard multiplex fare, rather than desperately attaching himself to an impersonal franchise (The Mummy) or flailingly attempting to kick start one (Jack Reacher: Never Go Back); remember when Cruise wouldn’t even go near sequels (for about 20 years, The Color of Money aside, and then only the one series)? American Made is still victim to the tendency of his movies to feel superstar-fitted rather than remaining as punchy as they might be on paper (Made’s never quite as satirically sharp as it wants to be), but it at least doesn’t lead its audience by the nose.

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

Two hundred thousand pounds, for this outstanding example of British pulchritude and learning.

The Avengers 4.18: The Girl From Auntie
I’ve mentioned that a few of these episodes have changed in my appreciation since I last watched the series, and The Girl from Auntie constitutes a very pronounced uptick. Indeed, I don’t know how I failed to rate highly the estimable Liz Fraser filling in for Diana Rigg – mostly absent, on holiday –for the proceedings (taking a not dissimilar amateur impostor-cum-sidekick role to Fenella Fielding in the earlier The Charmers). I could watch Fraser all day, and it’s only a shame this was her single appearance in the show.

By Jove, the natives are restless tonight.

The Avengers 4.17: Small Game for Big Hunters
I wonder if Death at Bargain Prices’ camping scene, suggestive of an exotic clime but based in a department store, was an inspiration for Small Game For Big Hunters’ more protracted excursion to the African country of Kalaya… in Hertfordshire. Gerry O’Hara, in his second of two episodes for the show again delivers on the atmosphere, making the most of Philip Levene’s teleplay.

Romulan ale should be illegal.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
(SPOILERS) Out of the ST:NG movies, Star Trek: Nemesis seems to provoke the most outrage among fans, the reasons mostly appearing to boil down to continuity and character work. In the case of the former, while I can appreciate the beef, I’m not enough of an aficionado to get too worked up. In the case of the latter, well, the less of the strained inter-relationships between this bunch that make it to the screen, the better (director Stuart Baird reportedly cut more than fifty minutes from the picture, most of it relating to underscoring the crew, leading to a quip by Stewart that while an Actor’s Cut would include the excised footage, a Director’s one would probably be even shorter). Even being largely unswayed by such concerns, though, Nemesis isn’t very good. It wants to hit the same kind of dramatic high notes as The Wrath of Khan (naturally, it’s always bloody Khan) but repeatedly drifts into an out-of-tune dirge.

Old Boggy walks on Lammas Eve.

Jeeves and Wooster 2.5: Kidnapped (aka The Mysterious Stranger)
Kidnapped continues the saga of Chuffnell Hall. Having said of 2.4 that the best Wodehouse adaptations tend to stick closely to the text, this one is an exception that proves the rule, diverging significantly yet still scoring with its highly preposterous additions.

Jeeves: Tis old boggy. He be abroad tonight. He be heading for the railway station.
Gone are many of the imbroglios involving Stoker and Glossop (the estimable Roger Brierley), including the contesting of the former’s uncle’s will. Also gone, sadly, is the inebriated Brinkley throwing potatoes at Stoker, which surely would have been enormous fun. Instead, we concentrate on Bertie being locked aboard Stoker’s yacht in order to secure his marriage to Pauline (as per the novel), Chuffy tailing Pauline in disguise (so there’s a different/additional reason for Stoker to believe Bertie and she spent the night together, this time at a pub en route to Chufnell Hall) and …

Cally. Help us, Cally. Help Auron.

Blake's 7 3.7: Children of Auron

Roger Parkes goes a considerable way towards redeeming himself for the slop that was Voice from the Past with his second script for the series, and newcomer Andrew Morgan shows promise as a director that never really fulfilled itself in his work on Doctor Who (but was evident in Knights of God, the 1987 TV series featuring Gareth Thomas).

I think we’ve returned to Eden. Surely this is how the World once was in the beginning of time.

1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
Ridley Scott’s first historical epic (The Duellists was his first historical, and his first feature, but hardly an epic) is also one of his least remembered films. It bombed at the box office (as did the year’s other attempted cash-ins on the discovery of America, including Superman: The Movie producers the Salkinds’ Christopher Columbus: The Discovery) and met with a less than rapturous response from critics. Such shunning is undeserved, as 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a richer and more thought-provoking experience than both the avowedly lowbrow Gladiator and the re-evaluated-but-still-so-so director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. It may stand guilty of presenting an overly sympathetic portrait of Columbus, but it isn’t shy about pressing a critical stance on his legacy.

Sanchez: The truth is, that he now presides over a state of chaos, of degradation, and of madness. From the beginning, Columbus proved himself completely incapable of ruling these islands…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog