Daily Archives: February 19, 2012

Starring

Craig T. Nelson – Steve Freeling
JoBeth Williams – Diane Freeling
Beatrice Straight – Dr. Lesh
Dominique Dunne  – Dana Freeling
Oliver Robins – Robbie Freeling
Heather O’Rourke  – Carol Anne Freeling

Summary

“What 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”

– From Amazon.com

Review

This was a very….interesting movie. It was rated PG but this movie is about 30 years old and I would say it definitely was not PG. It was more like PG-13. The movie was not scary when you compare it to todays standards, but it did have its moments which were definitely not  PG moments. There was a scene where The Beast made one of the ghost hunters hallucinate that something really gruesome was happening to his face and it was creepy. It would not be considered that to todays standards but the rest of the movie was so harmless that it was not expected and made you jump.

Then there was the clown. Don’t get me started on the clown. I hated clowns to start with but this just did it.The clown was there and then it wasn’t. I HATE clowns. Except Bello and Grandma.

But I hate these clowns.

Never have and never will.

This is a definite movie to watch as it is a classic (along with Nightmare on Elm Street (not seen that yet )) but I would definitely wait until you are at least 13 years of age to see this one. Just for a few reasons.

To read CommonSenseMedia.org’s review click here.

I did enjoy this movie and I may just have to check out Poltergeist II and Poltergesit III.

Hope that you enjoy this one.

“They’re here!”