Suburban Ghosts Revisited

If you ever want an object lesson in the things that make a good movie vs. the things that make a bad movie, you could do worse than make a study of the remake of Poltergeist (2015, directed by Gil Keanan). In its broad outlines, the remake is essentially the same damned movie, but where the original was a film that was fun and scary and inhabited by real people in a palpably real place, the remake is just...tired. I never really thought of the original Poltergeist as a foundational horror film, but damned if the remake doesn't wind up putting the original into perspective as one of the most influential films of its era. Any comparison is likely to favor the original film if the original is good enough to inspire a remake, but the fact that the remake completely craps the bed all on its own doesn't help things.

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Duplication Errors

Call it the Psycho dilemma: The danger that, when closely remaking a given film, you will miss some animating ka that gave the earlier film life. Gus Van Sant's Psycho is almost (though not quite) a frame for frame recreation of Hitchcock's film, but there's some spark of life that's missing. It's a film that sits dead on the screen. It's a bit like the kid in Pet Semetary. He looks like the living kid, but he's dead inside, and worse. He's possessed of something rancid and awful. Another such film is last year's Come Out and Play (2012, directed by Makinov), an ill-advised remake of Who Can Kill a Child? In both it's broad outlines and in its particulars, this is the same damned movie. Like Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates and the kid in Pet Semetary, something has been lost and replaced by something...wrong.

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Spam in a Cabin

I didn't go into Fede Alvarez's new version of Evil Dead (2013) expecting to hate it. Contrary to what you may think of people who write about film and their alleged disdain of movies, I want to enjoy the movies I see. I root for them to be good. I know that a lot of horror fans have had it up to here with remakes, but I don't mind them, really. I loved Alvarez's short film, "Panic Attack," in which giant robots destroy Montevideo. That film was chock full of filmmaking moxie and creativity, so I was hopeful. But, it was not to be.

One of the problems with contemporary horror remakes is that, often, the original items are foundational films that have been ripped off so often that their best effects have become genre cliches. That's what happened here. The original item was fresh and original. The remake is derivative and rote, lacking any kind of identity of its own. But let's give credit where credit is due: the new film adds missteps all its own, ported in from the genre's broader pool of cliches. Alas.

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