A family whose suburban home is haunted by evil forces must come together to rescue their youngest daughter after the apparitions take her captive.
Very tame, but saved from the remake scrapheap by Sam Rockwell's surprisingly touching performance and a final reel that – briefly – takes the material somewhere new.
There is some nice visual invention here and the performances are pleasing (including Jared Harris as a ghostbuster TV personality who comes to the rescue). But you won’t lose any sleep over it.
Spielberg’s suburban horror gets a credit crunch-era update, with Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt, but even new-school CGI can’t mask the cliched premise.
There's plenty of tension in this classic horror remake.
Verdict: More silly than scary.
A darkly comic story of family terror, this Poltergeist functions best when it draws upon directors like Joe Dante, its characters’ dry reactions in the face of horror just a few tweaks away from something you might see in Gremlins or The Hole. Instead this is a haunting without a home, with too few surprises to scare and not enough entertainment to endure.
Lacklustre.
Sam Rockwell leads an efficient but unremarkable remake of the 1982 original.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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