Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Poltergeist

Tobe Hooper – 1982 – USA

Famous for bearing the stamp of its producer, Steven Spielberg, far more prominently than its director, Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist was a big-budget Hollywood attempt to cash in on the mini-revolution in American horror films of the previous decade.  Raw, subversive, independent classics like Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978) were powerful precisely because of their modest scales, ingenuity and crews of outsiders full of fresh ideas.  Surely, Spielberg and the good people at Universal tapped Hooper because of his brilliant Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they expected him to shine in that foreign environment just as Spielberg had risen to the occasion when admitted into the big leagues.  But for whatever reason, it seems that Hooper recoiled and Spielberg had to take over.  (John Carpenter suffered a similar ordeal at Universal’s hands that year with The Thing, the failure of which sent him packing back to the indie world.   But at least in his case he kept control of the film and time has vindicated him; the film is now regarded as a virtually flawless masterpiece.)  Poltergeist seems a weak sister-film to Spielberg’s E.T. which was out the same year.  Both movies take place in the same affectionately-drawn suburban neighborhoods in which Spielberg grew up.  In a troubling way, the colorful and comedic early scenes depicting the average nuclear family are simultaneously the most successful thing in the movie and also the most calculated, corny and evocative of the schmaltz that was soon to be closely associated with Spielberg’s name.  This is a film that certainly would have been directed by more reliable Spielberg surrogates like Joe Dante or Robert Zemeckis under better circumstances, and it probably would have come out exactly as it is now; an overdone, showy and weirdly mean-spirited thrill-ride designed to delight the most average audience imaginable.  In that way, it is the template for many a Spielberg production to follow – i.e. Gremlins (1984), The Goonies (1985), Back to the Future (1985), etc. – films that, despite being crowd-pleasers, are uncomfortably perfect in their adherence to the Spielberg formula.  In any case, to get back to Poltergeist specifically, a few early scenes are promisingly creepy, but the rest is one excuse after another for a barrage of special effects that take the place of any real creativity, originality or an exploration of the deeper issues at hand.  Handled differently, the supernatural happenings in the story might have been unsettling instead of just comically gross.  It seems to be generally understood that Tobe Hooper didn’t deserve much or any of the credit for the film’s success, as it did his career no good; like Carpenter, he went right back to making more personal films in the way he knew how, such as Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986).

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