Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

I can't believe after all the years doing this blog, I'm still reviewing Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. I know what you're thinking – couldn't you just, like, stop reviewing them, then? The answer is yes, yes I could. But that would be so much less fun in that sweet schadenfraude way. I have to do this. It's just how it is.

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Starring: R. Lee Ermey, Jordana Brewster

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a prequel to the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is a real feat of confidence, as the gall it must take to assume anyone cared about that piece of shit movie and wanted to know more is far greater than anything I've ever felt.

This one starts off with a woman giving birth in the middle of a meat packing plant, which as everyone knows is exactly how you birth a serial killer. I'm glad they showed us this because I never would have known how Leatherface was born if they didn't and that was always the worst thing about the original movie. The way humans are born is just a total mystery to me so I'm glad this movie is setting the record straight on that!

Then we flash forward like 20 years to the same meat packing plant, now closing down, I assume, to become a vegetarian meat packing plant. Damn new trends... actually it's because of financial woes, I guess. For some reason, Leatherface is working there right as it's closing down – he's working in the exact same place he was born. I wonder what that's like... must be weird.

Then we learn by watching the manager that it's a bad idea to insult a mentally handicapped giant with a hammer in his hand while you're all alone in close proximity in the dark – it doesn't turn out well for him, to say the least.

And we see how he gets his infamous chainsaw – he just picks it up off the table at the meat factory as he's leaving. What an Earth shattering revelation. I am amazed how these writers were able to tie together the rich history of that chainsaw throughout multiple movies.

The main characters this time around are totally different from the last movie. Instead of a bunch of really attractive people, it's a bunch of really attractive people who have a few lines in the movie about going to Vietnam to fight a war. What a change! I guess these two guys are brothers and one of them doesn't want to go back to the war. Yeah, this is awesome. I watch slasher horror movies for serious plots about Vietnam war draft dodgers. I'm weird like that!

I do like the one scene of the brother tied up about to have sex with his girlfriend, and then he can't do it at the last minute because he's thinking about his brother too much. An every day occurrence I'm sure. Maybe producer Michael Bay is working some stuff out with scenes like this.

This is the time for deep thinking...

So I guess the Leatherface family, helmed again by R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt character, are upset that the meat factory closed down because, I guess, this will mean the town is taken over by hippies and bikers? What a weird correlation. Except then we see that they're right – bikers just magically appear in town. Right on cue!

Did they sprout from the ground like mutated weeds? What the hell?

What follows is an incredibly strange scene in which this one woman biker chases the heroes on a motorcycle on the road with a giant gun to rob them – because I guess the movie forgot that this is TCM and not fucking Mad Max. But to be fair, a Mad Max sequel would be way better than this movie.

I liked her better when her name was Sarah Connor.

There's also an insane car crash that flips the car over and shatters several windows, yet the people inside don't break any bones or show much injury at all save for some blood on their heads! Man is that gonna be a mess! Damn car crashes.

It'll take hours to wash this off and put makeup back on! Fucking car crashes!

Hoyt shows up and kills the biker girl though, kidnapping three of the main characters – both brothers and the blonde chick. The other girl is not kidnapped because she was instead thrown out of the car in that crash earlier, yet she's perfectly fine and without a scratch on her! Because, I guess they can't have anything that ruins her hotness at all, lest they lose the interest of the people they delusionally think are watching.

The next forty minutes of this movie is all a bunch of torture porn nonsense. Really nothing scary at all – just gore and torture crap, which is almost always awful no matter what. A few highlights:

There's a needless scene where Hoyt makes the one brother do push-ups and then keeps hitting him while he's down. It goes on waaaay too long and has no point – Ermey's character just isn't well written enough to make it work as a tense scene. It's kinda gross and weird, but not scary or tense in the least. Plus being in broad daylight makes it kind of lame.

He's in the military and can barely do any push ups. Weird.

The main girl teams up with this lone biker guy to go save everyone, and their brilliant plan is of course to go do it alone. No point in even trying to get help, because what would THAT accomplish? You know, except for an awesome scene where a bunch of badass bikers fight Leatherface? That would actually be a cool scene, but what do we get? Just more of the same boring crap.

Instead, the biker shoots this old man in the family and then is butchered by Leatherface in an extremely predictable manner – it is always amazing to me how horror movie scripts do these tired, predictable scenes over and over like this. Do they think we all just have amnesia and really don't know what's going to happen at every fucking turn? I really want to meet the ideal person they think is going to watch this: “Holy fuck, I never expected him to jump out at that extremely obvious moment! What avant garde film technique!”

It's gory, but is it scary? No. No it isn't. That would require actual suspense and stuff we haven't seen a hundred times over.

Then Hoyt decides to make Leatherface cut off the old guy's legs, both of them, because he was shot in one of them. Even the other family members seem baffled by this, which is the real Litmus test for what a piece of shit you are, if the Leatherface family thinks you've gone too far.

So while the 2003 remake skipped out on the dinner scene so infamous in the original film, THIS one decided to put it in for no logical reason at all! Better late than never I guess, even when it makes no sense. Except I guess to establish that... the family is crazy and has always been crazy, since they apparently do this constantly? What an astute judgment of their characters. Why aren't the writers working in the field of clinical psychology?

"We could just kill you now, but that would make no sense for our plan of making no sense. We're just crazy! So we do nonsensical things!"

Hoyt gets beaten up with his head smashed against the floor several times, which looks pretty bad. It was mentioned at some point that he was in the Korean war – so can this just be a Jacob's Ladder scenario where none of this movie happened and it's all in his head as he's dying? Both of those things would be the best case scenario for me.

Then the main girl escapes and goes running through another meat factory, exactly like in the end of the 2003 remake. I wonder if the Leatherface family feels weird about their lives repeating all these moments over and over again, verbatim, like they're trapped in a Hellish loop.

Perhaps the silliest part of all is when she finds this car and gets in, only for Leatherface to suddenly pop up in the back seat after several minutes of driving and kill her. How did she NOT see him back there? He's a seven foot tall fucking giant with a chainsaw. That car isn't that big – it's not like he had a lot of room. So what the fuck, right? I don't feel bad at all about her dying because of this.

"I am very quiet and flexible enough to fit into small places. Isn't that cool?" 

I turned to Nathan before this happened, as she was getting in the car, and was like, wouldn't it be funny if he just popped up in the car behind her like Michael Myers? We laughed about it. Then it happened. That's pretty bad. How dare this movie appease the ridiculous whims of my imagination?

Then Leatherface gets out of the car and walks away into the complete black darkness on the other side of the road. Why is it like that? Can't they put in some fucking street lights over there?

She crashes her car into a state trooper and kills him - some street light could've prevented this tragedy.

Seriously, though, what's the point of anything in this? It's supposedly a prequel to show what happened before the Texas Chainsaw story, but it doesn't do anything but give us a rehash of the same shit we already know about. Oh, but there's a two-second scene of him being born and then finding a chainsaw! The audience was really too dumb to piece THOSE things together!

The rest of it is just boring. The original was good because the violence felt real and they didn't just shove blood and guts in your face from people tied to tables. This one is a bunch of torture porn gore garbage. Fuck this.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 remake is a movie I picked to review around the holiday season because it is all about a family and the dysfunctional ways they have to live with one another. This was the worst movie I had ever seen when I was 14 and didn't know any other movies. I figured maybe I had been overexaggerating, and in the years since, I sort of had it built up in my head that this wasn't too bad in the grand scheme of things.

Well, I was right back at age 14. This is a huge pile of cinematic manure.

Director: Marcus Nispel

Starring: Jessica Biel, R. Lee Ermey

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This was back in the days when horror remakes were made by people who had no clue how to make a horror movie. Like, their idea of a good cast of horror actors was, cast a bunch of people who look like they belong on fashion magazine covers or underwear/swimsuit model ads. And Jessica Biel – can't forget her!

And their idea of dialogue was to just have every character be a total ass to one another for no reason! They just bitch and whine and argue so much that Leatherface is basically the new good guy of the movie. Congratulations if that was what you were going for. This is basically Tucker and Dale vs Evil from the perspective of the teenagers.

Unfortunately, Leatherface doesn't show up for like the first forty minutes of this movie, so until then it's a lot of arguing about nothing from these characters who have the personalities and looks of background extras in a shitty music video. Hell, they even pick up a hitchhiking girl who is depressed so much by their horridness, she kills herself right in their van:

Is that not what happened? I dunno. It is to me.

Anyway, they keep on arguing from then on what to do about the body, with some of them insisting it would be wrong to just dump the body on the ground. They try to pawn it off at a local gas station, but the lady won't have it or help them at all, except to say the cops could be there several hours from now. But they're going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, so they don't have time for that shit. So I guess driving around with a bloody corpse in the back seat is the new plan!

"Look, can we just leave the bloody corpse inside your store and go to our concert? We could leave it in the Produce aisle."

I guess they're trying to find a police station to pawn it off on, but they don't try that hard – instead of just finding out where the next police station is, they seem content with driving around randomly with no direction. Okay then! They do find a house with an old, legless man in it, and he lets them call the cops. The only problem is, the old man gets stuck upstairs and makes Jessica Biel help him up, as an excuse to grope her ass... because THAT'S what Texas Chainsaw Massacre needed, an ass-groping scene randomly.

The OTHER only problem is, Douchebag Boyfriend guy decides to come in and randomly poke around the house. Which is a terrible idea, because that's where Leatherface is lurking around! He kills Douchebag Boyfriend guy with a hammer while his back is turned. How did he stay so quiet and unnoticed before this? A big guy like Leatherface, you'd think Jessica Biel would have heard him and he would have killed her. But I guess he has very tiny, quiet feet and can move like a mouse. And because Biel is the main character, she gets immunity for now for no reason.

So she comes back out and finds the rest of her friends, all of whom are mildly concerned that Douchebag Boyfriend is missing but not that worried. They search for him by doing the Old Cliche Dumb Horror Movie thing: just walking around shouting his name. Maybe if they stand three feet over that way, the acoustics will carry and he'll FINALLY hear you shouting his name and come out from wherever he is!

I also love the stupid bullshit in all these movies where characters assume their missing friends are playing pranks on them. Who does that? Are they just such shitty people that they'd make you believe they were missing in a strange, unfriendly place? I guess I can see why they'd think this, though – one of their own guys decides to stick his arm inside a hole in a car and then pretend to get pulled inside, only to reveal it was a joke. What a douchebag. If I was the rest of them, I'd just leave his ass behind.

"Ha ha ha, I'm a worthless waste of human air and you should be ashamed for knowing me."

They do eventually get split up, and Biel and this other moron get stuck inside the Leatherface house again. The moron ends up in the kitchen, where he checks under every pot and pan on the stove and even looks in the fridge, finding all kinds of weird, wacky stuff. What is he expecting to find in there? Does he think his friend shrank down to a miniature size and is now hiding in the fridge behind the rotten meat this family no doubt keeps there?

"Bro, are you in there?"

Meanwhile, this crazy “sheriff” guy shows up, immediately spitting a disgusting brown loogie out of his mouth. That is so gross that I would've just been like 'nope, bring me another sheriff! This won't do at all!'

So he basically tortures the other three assholes for a super long time, and in a not-very-scary way – he has the nerdy glasses-wearing guy mime how the girl from the opening scene killed herself. I guess this is supposed to be threatening, but honestly it drags on waaaay too long and was never scary in the first place. Mostly it is just annoying to watch the sheriff guy mug for the camera and chew scenery like a starving man on a desert island given a rump roast. Jesus Christ is he bad.

Jesus, will somebody get the suicide help line on set for these maniacs? On second thought, eh, maybe don't.

I guess after that we get the reveal that the sheriff guy is working for the Leatherface family! Wow! I couldn't have seen that coming unless I had even the smallest morsel of a brain cell! Also, this barely feels like Texas Chainsaw at all. I don't care if you don't keep every little detail of the original, but this just feels like Shitty Midwest Horror Movie #933357.

Even the crazy family trope that was so integral to the original is toned down. The original family was totally unhinged, just mad and raving and constant screaming and noise. This one? Eh. Just kinda irritating and gross! Not that big of a deal. Pretty sure you could find some similar families in any rural outback state if you turned down a creepy enough road. Remember, the overall theme of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is “Mediocre boring stuff, because the crazed excess of the original was just not that important to bring back!”

Guess which one of these pictures is from a movie that's actually scary?

So Biel gets kidnapped and thrown in a basement, where she finds the one guy whose leg got cut off in another scene hung up on a hook. He doesn't really seem to be bleeding or in any great pain, and earlier we saw him trying to unhook himself from the hook and acting like he just got a hangnail rather than a meathook in his back – why would THAT hurt, after all? Biel ends up killing him to put him out of his misery. Got to love how there's no blood at first when the camera is on him, but then it's just all over Biel in the next shot.

Blood: who knows how it works? It's just magic!

Speaking of Biel being all wet, this movie sure does love to make up excuses for her to get her white T shirt wet and show off her boobs. That seems to be what they wanted to get across: Jessica Biel has breasts. How informative of them!

Honestly, though, as the movie drags on and on through the endless, boring, poorly done chase scene, Biel just keeps getting that tight white shirt wet! The movie seems to have an endless amount of excuses – the sprinklers are on in the random meat factory she runs into and that gets her soaking wet! Then outside, even though it was perfectly dry all movie, suddenly it's a monsoon of pouring rain that soaks her to the skin!

To offset this, the director and producers just thought about feminism and Susan B. Anthony a lot while filming, so this is actually OK in my books now.

Christ. Just call this 'Jessica Biel: Wet T-Shirt Contest Winner,' put it in the Special Interest section of the video store and it would've been more honest. I mean, I wouldn't be complaining if you did that – it'd be honest. But as is, it's not like she ever gets naked or anything, so what really is the point?

And this isn't some kind of porno. It's a fucking horror movie. Do the directors of this kind of trash think we have nowhere else we can look to see tits? If your only source of seeing boobs is to watch a serial killer slasher movie... you probably have a freezer full of dead animals that I think the cops should know about.

I know that was a lot of talk about boobs, but honestly, there was nothing else of interest happening. Fucking boring, shitty chase scene that has nothing on the terrifying 1974 version, and Leatherface is basically just Jason Voorhees with a chainsaw here. Total snoozefest.

I guess there is some subplot about a stolen baby, possibly from the woman who killed herself at the beginning of the film, though it's never elaborated on. Biel figures out the baby doesn't belong to them. I only bring this up because, in a totally unrelated scene, the baby goes missing from the Leatherface family's home! Now, come on. Don't jump to conclusions. Maybe baby's just taken his first steps!

But no, of course Biel took him. They drive away in a stolen car. I'm sure that infamous 'dinner scene' is coming up soon, right? I mean, any second now...

Wow. They just left it out, huh? Ah well. What was ever important about THAT scene in the original movie? You can totally just do TCM without it! Doesn't neuter it like a sad cat at all. Remember, the motto of this movie is 'Mediocre boring stuff that doesn't have the craziness or extremity of the original, because that wasn't important.'

This is horrible. I can't believe this ever was some kind of cutting-edge horror – but it kinda was, for 2003. This was sadly the norm for that time period, with awful disposable characters acting like jackasses so you would root for them to die in terrible ways, a lot of blatant and pointless sex symbolism that was never needed and, especially in the case of remakes, they missed the point of the original work. You don't have to keep everything identical – I like it when things change, I want to see your original interpretations of it. But to just miss the point this hard, and take out everything that was good...

Fuck Texas Chainsaw Massacre '03. Thank god this kind of slop isn't the norm anymore for the genre.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Guest Column: Ed Gein: The Original Backwoods Bumpkin

This column was written by guest writer Spencer Blohm.

Ed Gein. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

He was a good old-fashioned boy, according to his neighbors. He was described as quiet and shy, and lived with his mother until the day she died. But on November 16, 1957, store owner Bernice Worden disappeared — and what the search party would find at Ed Gein’s house would shock America and inspire a sub-genre of horror movies that continue to this day: hixploitation.

Plainfield, Wisconsin was a town right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, which only made matters more perplexing when sheriff’s deputies discovered Gein’s gruesome collection. Not only had he killed Worden, he had decapitated her body and hung her upside down like a freshly hunted deer. Worden’s heart was in a saucepan on the stove. Among the other items found were bowls made from human skulls, and lampshades and chairs covered in human skin. Gein had not only killed, but he had raided the local graveyard for trophies — he even constructed a “woman suit” to wear after he had decided he wanted a sex change.

America had never seen anything like this; it had cannibalistic and sexual overtones almost impossible for reporters to describe in detail. Gein was arraigned on November 21, 1957 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; he would eventually be tried in 1968 and found guilty after a one-week trial, but was remanded back to the hospital until his death in 1984.

The Midwest’s idyllic perception of itself was destroyed. Before, if someone lived on a farm by themselves or with their mother, it was assumed that they merely wanted privacy. News of the Gein case invited grim speculation about what other horrors might be tucked away out of public view in the rural countryside. The farmer who lived a solitary existence became a person to be feared, and it became a true horror trope when Robert Bloch chose to put his stamp on the story...

Bloch was a horror novelist who knew a terrifying story when he saw it, and the Gein story inspired him to pen the novel Psycho, subsequently made into a movie by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. Norman Bates, just like Gein, had an unhealthy attraction to his mother and had preserved her corpse in the Bates Motel. Psycho was a success both as a book and as a movie, and others would attempt to duplicate its success — most without much luck.

Then in 1974 came two films with a different take on the Gein story: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Alan Ormsby’s Deranged. Ormsby took a more factual approach, changing the names but sticking fairly close to Gein’s story. Hooper took the Gein story and repurposed facts to suit his own narrative, which placed the story not in the Midwest but in rural Texas. Hooper’s film centered around a redneck family in the middle of nowhere making a living by selling barbecued tourist meat. This was a true hixploitation film in every sense of the word — the rural white family, the twisted values, lack of intelligence, and complete removal from mainstream society. Leatherface, with his penchant for tailoring masks from human skin and dressing as a woman, is a homage to Gein. While Texas became an enormous success (leading to several sub-par sequels and inept remakes) Deranged quickly fell of the radar after its release, but it has garnered a lot of attention recently thanks to Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey Network, which has screened both films somewhat frequently this past year on cable and DTV (more information here).

Later, the movie Motel Hell approached the hixploitation genre in a more comical way, taking the “country redneck” trope and satirizing it with a cringe-inducing story about a redneck hotel owner who has his own victims in perverse pasture so he can make jerky out of their skin. Later, The Silence of the Lambs was a best-selling book and Oscar-winning film about an FBI agent raised in rural West Virginia tracking a killer who skins his victims and wears their skin. But all these movies, whether comedy, drama or straight-up horror film, owe their inspiration to that solitary man from Wisconsin named Ed Gein.

REVIEW: Poltergeist (1982)

Steven Spielberg is a man of many talents. He has brought us so many things from dinosaurs coming to life on the big screen to Abraham Lincoln coming to life on the big screen, and one of his more beloved endorsements is a quaint little film called Poltergeist.

Director: Tobe Hooper

Starring: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Heather O'Rourke

IMDb

Yes, this classic horror film has been a sort of classic in the history of the genre since it came out in 1982. It was directed by Tobe Hooper, who gave us Texas Chainsaw Massacre…

But also gave us the sequel.

So you can see how I’d be skeptical upon watching a film from a man who brought us such polar opposites in quality. But Poltergeist is one of the classics and I’d be a shmuck if I didn’t give it its fair dues. Let’s take a look at this bizarre and shocking old film and see what makes it tick.

The film begins with families at Thanksgiving fighting over the TVs and changing the channel in the house next door, just like any holiday should have. I’m so glad the film has such conflicts as “what should we watch on TV, football or Mr. Rogers?” Any film without THAT level of conflict just doesn’t get full marks in my books.

I'm just struck by how pointless this whole thing is...it goes on for way too long and ends up feeling like a big silly joke, especially when the neighbor character isn't really ever elaborated on or anything. Like the movie just forgot about him.

And to add to the bone chilling drama, we also get a dead bird and the mom tries to flush it down the toilet, but gets caught by the daughter, Carol Anne:

Busted! So they give it a Viking funeral and send it off to an afterlife with 777 virgins awaiting it…well, OK, they bury it in the backyard with some flowers and a picture of the family. How touching. It’s so touching that they immediately get fish right after!

Later on the son, Robbie, is trying to go to sleep, but keeps getting scared of the freaky clown he has sitting on a chair facing his bed…so why even have the clown sitting there at all? Also he’s afraid of the tree outside which is just crazy in how twisted it is…he has blinds that he could close, but he chooses just to leave ‘em open so the tree can scare the shit out of him.

Pennywise's Disciple.

I think this kid is a masochist. Or at the very least, just wants an excuse to go in and see his parents smoking pot and acting like jackasses in the next room over, so loudly that I’m surprised anyone else in the house gets any sleep at all. Good parenting, guys! Top notch!

After a long day of Mr. Rogers, dead parakeets and buying fish, the parents like some relaxing time...

The daughter apparently sleepwalks and ends up going to sit in front of the TV and watch the static, proclaiming loudly “They’re Here!” This line is one of the film’s most memorable, but apparently the mother didn’t care enough to ask what she meant then, but instead brings it up the next morning at breakfast, because that’s great morning talk…Carol Anne replies that “The TV People” are here, which the mother just takes as nonsense I guess...too pot-addled to really care what her daughter is doing...you know, if this was made in the 2000s, it would probably heavily focus on the dysfunctional aspects of this family.

However, later on the chairs start moving by themselves! Groovy, huh?

Wouldn't they be able to hear this happening before the ghosts could make the chairs into that exact pattern? And what is the ghosts' motive for such a thing, anyway? Do they just get off on making random, nonviolent, silly acts happen?

By the time the dad, Steven, gets home, the mom has gone completely nuts about the whole thing and is excited that she can put a chair in the middle of the room and it moves across the floor by itself. They even try it with Carol Anne!

Have I mentioned that I'm not thrilled with the way the mother acts in this film? Might as well just send your daughter to school through the neighborhood infested with gang violence at this point; couldn't possibly get any less considerate of her safety.

It’s also notable that the mother, Diane, is afraid Carol Anne will sleepwalk outside and fall into the pool which is still being completed in the backyard. Uh, there are things called LOCKS for a reason, you dumbass! I think I see where Robbie gets his window closing phobia from. I guess this is just a family that thinks the whole world is a death trap. Everything can kill you, and why bother trying to prevent that? Living in fear is the only way to live! Luckily, the rest of this horror movie won’t make those views any worse. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? Is that creepy tree going to burst through the windows and attack Robbie and Carol Anne? Pfft…

And tonight on "When Trees Attack"...

Oh. Well….shit.

Then they find out that Carol Anne has been taken by the strange mystical void inside their bedroom closet. They search the whole house but end up finding out that she is actually inside the TV static she spent so much time watching in a trance earlier. This is where the film gets a little more serious, as now we see the family pushed to their limits as they try to figure out what happened and how to fix it, and also the house is pretty fully haunted, too. So they call in this paranormal research squad who helps out mostly by telling them the house is dangerous. Gee, I wonder why…

Hmmmmmm....yeah it's probably haunted. INSIGHTFUL DEDUCTIONS!!!

Also we get this scene, where one of the paranormal research dudes ends up getting a face lift…

Ohhhhh yeah, flash those sexy looks!

The next day, Steven’s boss comes around to see why Steven hasn’t been to work lately, and they go to the graveyard on the hill to talk about buying the whole plot and building more houses on it. Steven finds out that his house was built on a graveyard and that that’s probably why their house is currently haunted. So even though Steven was apparently such an integral part of the company, one of their best salesmen…he didn’t know they ever did things like this? That’s a bit hard to swallow, movie. For such a top employee, he sure doesn’t know much about the business practices of his own company!

Then they call in this lady, who is some kind of spirit medium…

And by the power vested in me...I WILL GIVE THE HAMMIEST PERFORMANCE IN THE FILM, BY FAR!

...she then makes rounds of the house and tells the family exactly what the audience has already known for several scenes now: the house is haunted, Carol Anne is stuck in a halfway-dimension where she has to stay away from “the light,” and they have to get her back. Brilliant deductions! Truly if the audience didn’t hear all this twenty minutes ago, they’ll get it now. A brilliant strategy to waste the audience’s time if I ever saw one…

Now, okay, to be honest, these are some of the best parts of the movie, as the pace slows down and the family prepares for what’s to come next. We get some nice atmosphere, some good dialogue and the characters are fleshed out more as we really see what they’re going through. The film has had a great sense of atmosphere and setting for its duration and that continues now. The balance between the fast-paced, screamy parts and the quieter and more subtle ones is very well done. So there. I CAN be honest and admit a film's good points! Ha! Proved anyone wrong who thought otherwise!

So that spirit medium lady tells them it’s time to take action, and we get the big plan of sending Diane through the portal with a rope around her waist to save Carol Anne…and it works. There’s a lot of screaming, yelling, wind blowing and bright lights, but it works, and they get shat out of the vortex covered in blood and entrails for some reason. The spirit medium then says everything is A-OK! Which will be proven very, very wrong soon…where did she get her degree again? A back alley drug dealer or something? A back alley drug dealer of spiritual medium degrees? It’s possible.

The family moves out but stays in the house for one night longer…why? After all that bullshit, they’re not just going to leave immediately and stay at a hotel? They even let the kids sleep in their same room! You know…the one with the insane hell portal in the closet that only just got closed a few hours ago? Screw the idea that it’s safe…GET YOUR KIDS OUT OF THERE, YOU MORONS! Why do I get the idea these parents are the kinds of people who would just let their kids wander around without supervision in the neighborhood chainsaw and serial rapist super-store?

As expected, the hell portal opens up again, proving that the spirit medium lady was full of shit the whole time. Just look at what these parents have been letting their kids live next to all these years:

Reminds me of the time I had a portal to hell in my bedroom....just one of those things every kid goes through, like puberty, ya know?

Looks perfectly safe to me!

And then we see what happens when Diane takes a dip in the pool…

Hey, you skeletons! Get out of here! Go swim in the other pool. You don’t pay enough to be able to use this one and it’s really inconsiderate to those who do pay the extra fees…ugh, stupid skeletons. Such freeloaders.

Then we witness the collapse of the American housing market as the owner of Steven’s real estate company comes back just in time to witness this:

It's a fixer-upper.

Somehow I doubt he will have much luck finding new tenants for this neighborhood after this.

So that’s Poltergeist, the horror film where nobody dies and somehow it still ended up becoming a classic anyway. Spielberg and Hooper just delivered a great film with this one, as it’s filled with memorable scenes, cool atmosphere and good characters. Some parts get a bit dull and maybe the movie doesn’t need to be 2 hours long, but the overall film is still worth watching for some classic scenes and very enjoyable moments. 

It's a doofy, soft-headed movie but it's got heart to it, and plus, some scenes are just great. How can anyone deny the great chaotic scenes at the end of the film, where everything is going nuts? It’s just tons of fun. And there’s a certain simple, innocuous pleasure to the film, too, that gives it a sort of personal and intimate edge over films that copy it like Insidious and The Orphanage in later years. Those films perhaps took their themes further than this one did, but they don’t really have the “heart” that Poltergeist has, and so there’s something here that you might not find anywhere else. Call it the classic ‘80s’ style of Spielberg.

Much has been said about the “Poltergeist curse” which surrounded this franchise, in which many of the lead actors died in strange circumstances as well as other people involved in the production. It doesn't factor into my enjoyment of this movie, so I didn't feel I needed to mention it in the actual review. The most tragic is probably Dominique Dunne, who played the older daughter, and who was murdered by her boyfriend before the film even came out. There really are no words for that, and I'm dedicating the review to her memory as well as to the memory of all the others who passed away in the middle of this series of films. Hats off to the lost ones of the Poltergeist series...and let us move forward, to the sequels!

Images copyright of their original owners; I do not own any of them.