Amazon.com video review:
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
Amazon.com video review:
The law of diminishing returns was obeyed
assiduously by the three Poltergeist movies, which have been
boxed together to show how Hollywood milks an idea for every last
ounce of cash it can. The best in this series is the original,
directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by Steven Spielberg (who
reportedly also lent a hand behind the camera), about a suburban
family whose house turns out to have been built on an Native American burial
ground. In the film's most clever touch, the disturbed spirits attack
the family (and pluck its youngest daughter into the netherworld)
through the TV. Oddly, though the family moves away in the sequel, the
spirits follow them, then remain committed to harassing the daughter
in number three, even though she's gone to stay with relatives. By
that last film, the special effects have become the raison d'etre for
the whole movie (which later launched an entire cable TV series). Why
didn't they just call Ghostbusters? --Marshall Fine
Amazon.com video review:
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
