Poltergeist (25th Anniversary Edition)
by Tobe Hooper
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Actor: Craig T. Nelson, Dominique Dunne, Heather O'Rourke, JoBeth Williams, Zelda RubinsteinDirector: Tobe Hooper
Brand: Warner Brothers
Cinematographer: Matthew F. Leonetti
Producer: Frank Marshall
Producer: Kathleen Kennedy
Producer: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Mark Victor
Writer: Michael Grais
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 4.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Mandarin Chinese (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 4.0; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 4.0; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Portuguese (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 4.0; Portuguese (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Restored, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Widescreen, 2.40:1
Running Time: 114 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-10-09
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- DVD
- 16 X 9 LETTERBOX
- O-Sleeve Amaray
- Dolby Surround 2.0 - Spanish Dolby Surround 5.1 - English Dolby Surround Stereo - English Dolby Surround Stereo - French Mono 1.0 - Portuguese
DVD Reviews of Poltergeist (25th Anniversary Edition)
DVD Review: Masterful suburban horror film digs its roots in all over the place
Summary: 5 Stars
**** PLEASE NOTE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW, IF YOU'VE NOT SEEN THE FILM YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO READ MY REVIEW FIRST ****
So this is one of those films that I "should" have seen a long time ago; it came out in the early summer of 1982, when I was 16, between my junior and senior years of high school. I didn't yet have my driver's license and lived 10 miles from the nearest theater, out in the country, so had to rely on mom or friends with licenses (of which I had none) to get to movies - and I had a minimal allowance and didn't work outside of the plentiful chores at home. Thus I didn't see a lot of movies, and I really had no interest in horror at that point, and didn't really know directors or writers. The fact that the guy who wrote, produced, and co-edited (uncredited) this film was the same guy behind my previous summer's favorite "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was just something I didn't catch. And for whatever reason, I've never caught up to it in all the years since, still not being a huge horror fan and no longer being a huge Spielberg fan.
But last night I finally did, and what was I thinking leaving this so long? This is Spielberg really hitting the core of his suburban-southwestern-America-as-the-world mythology, his nuclear family beset by strangeness and chaos from beyond, and hitting it supercharged on all cylinders. Interestingly enough the only reference to a specific place here is a quick mention of "I-74", which runs from Iowa to North Carolina - but the feel of the place to me wasn't much different than that of "E.T." or "Close Encounters", obviously the two films with which it has the closest affinity. It's Everywhere USA I suppose - everywhere outside of the Northeast, anyway. Flyover country.
Of course this is credited to director Tobe Hooper - the man behind "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Lifeforce" among others - but it feels Spielbergian all the way through, from the pans over the tract housing, to the cutesy kids, to the visual references to buddy George Lucas' work to the playing of one of Spielberg's favorite films, "A Guy Named Joe" on TV. In fact, the film opens with a TV, as the station goes off the air after midnight (I guess that'll date the film to many) and we're left with static. The story is pretty simple - a nice, young suburban family consisting of parents Steve & Diane (Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams), and kids Dana, Robbie and Carol Anne (Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins and Heather O'Rourke) live in a modern, bland but very comfortable large suburban home and are beset by a demonic presence which eventually snatches Carol Anne away after some less harmful fun, leaving her parents to try to get her back through use of parapsychologists and a medium/mystic. The film builds rather slowly for its first half hour, then escalates pretty quickly - which works well because you'd wonder why the family doesn't leave right away otherwise. From about a third of the way in, it's a roller-coaster ride every bit as exciting as Raiders but there's a lot more going on underneath I think.
Steve and Diane love each other and seem to be fairly committed - this is a rare Spielberg happy family with few problems - on the outside. Sure they're a little distracted, they smoke a little too much dope maybe (this was a bit of a surprise) and they're not terribly concerned about the kids' nightmares at first - but there's nothing really wrong here that is their fault. Except that they're shallow and just don't seem to pay all that much attention to what's going on around them, don't seem to have much inner life. Spielberg and Hooper build the early part of the film quite carefully - subtle moments like Diane's comment to Steve to "reach back into our past, when you used to have an open mind" show us that this is a couple that has chosen this rather dull and conformist existence; later we start to feel that they also are going through life blindly and purposelessly. The one scene we have with Steve on his job (he's a salesman for the very same models of homes that he lives in) he seems a little distracted, uninterested, having to dredge up how to sell the home rather than really showing enthusiasm. The house the family lives in is the setting for over 90% of the film, their sanctuary, their only world.
But then the supernatural forces take over their lives - they have to let others in, and the "ghostbusters" (well, two of the three) show themselves to be very serious and very aware of what they might be dealing with. Beatrice Straight, as Dr. Lesh, the psychologist in charge, and Zelda Rubinstein as the psychic eventually called in to form something like an exorcism, are very clear that there are powerful forces - that they absolutely believe in but cannot truly understand - at work; that this situation calls into question our most basic beliefs - but it's never quite clear what if anything Diane and Steve believe in, other than their daily existence of working, sending the kids off to school, etc. At first I thought that the reclaiming of Carol Anne would have been a good ending for the film - but they have to actually go in and fight the monster lurking at the heart both of the house and their own shallow psyches, and though they escape physically unharmed, at the end the dream house is gone, and there is a palpable sense of defeat as the bloodied family retreats to a hotel, pushing the symbol of their solipsism, a TV, outside.
I haven't seen enough of Tobe Hooper's work to really be able to say that this fits in any way with his directorial "vision"; it's pretty clear that Spielberg's is an equal, if not the presiding, voice here. Maybe the photography is a little less pretty, maybe it's a little more gruesome and a little less sentimental than his other work, but whether that's coming from director or writer/producer I'm not sure I care - this is the most clear-eyed and pessimistic of Spielberg's early films, still plenty full of the gosh-wow (the FX look pretty good for a film of this period and the scares are still there) but on the whole a pretty harsh indictment of the shallowness of the suburban fantasy-life and of the denial and repression of history - as we find out, to no one's surprise, that the development our heroic family has been living in is an old burial ground, never de-consecrated, never forgotten, at least by the dead. They don't, in the end, manage to bring anybody over to the "other side" - but they do cause enough trauma to prevent any typical Spielbergian happy ending from glossing over.
Pretty much tied with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for my favorite film with Spielberg's name on it.
Description of Poltergeist (25th Anniversary Edition)
POLTERGEIST 25TH ANNIVERSARY:DELUXE E - DVD MovieWhat a combo! Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, teamed up with family-oriented producer Steven Spielberg to make Poltergeist. The film is about a haunted suburban tract home in a development very much like the Arizona one in which Spielberg was raised. (Because it came out the same summer as Spielberg's E.T., it was tempting to see both movies as representing Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about childhood in suburbia. One was a fantasy, the other a nightmare.) Spielberg also cowrote the screenplay, which taps into primal, childlike fears of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, sinister clown faces, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. At first, some of the odd happenings in the house are kind of funny and amusing, but they grow gradually creepier until the film climaxes in a terrifying special-effects extravaganza when 5-year-old Carole Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is kidnapped by the spooks and held hostage in another dimension. Though not nearly as frightening as Hooper's magnum opus, or the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came along two years later, Poltergeist is one of the smartest and most entertaining horror pictures of its time. --Jim Emerson
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