Poltergeist (1982) vs Poltergeist (2015)

When the original Poltergeist hit UK cinemas in 1982, it was quite a big deal. Back then big budget haunted house movies at the cinema were, if not non-existent, then few and far between - 1979’s The Amityville Horror, The Changeling and The Shining from the following year being other notable exceptions.

Watching the original Poltergeist now it all seems rather quaint, with some very dated effects which were obviously state of the art at the time. Arguably it was a movie that hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be, a fright flick or a family movie. This may have been attributable to the dual directorship, with Tobe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper’s reportedly rather laid back role in the chair gradually being supplanted by Steven Spielberg’s more hands on and family-friendly approach. The resultant X certificate from the BBFC (since downgraded to a 15) showed that the censor considered it a movie for adults – it was given a PG in the US on appeal. But the homeliness of the opening scenes, and the overall sense of wonder and wide-eyed awe suggested by the movie’s grand special effects set pieces, point to it being at heart a family film, albeit one with some grotesque touches.

For the two of you unfamiliar with the plot, the story involves the Freeling family and their three perky kids who live in the newly built suburb of Cuesta Verde. Dad Steve is employed by the real estate company who built the homes and stay at home mum Diane completes the wholesome American family. Youngest child Carol Anne starts hearing voices in the TV set, the beginning of a series of supernatural happenings which culminate in Carol Anne being snatched away into a kind of spiritual ether – she’s not dead but we can’t see her, only hear her voice.

A team of largely winging it parapsychologists are called in, but they have to resort to the heavy duty if minutely packaged talents of psychic Tangina, who understands what the spirits want and is finally successful in getting Carol Anne back. But the spooks are angered further by the little girl’s return, for they are the souls of the dead on whom the Freeling’s house is built (parts of the estate were constructed on the site of a cemetery), and who, in return for having their real life plaything taken from them and their resting place disturbed, exact a housebuilding in reverse revenge.

1982 Poltergeist hasn’t aged that well, but the acting is solid and the tone light and very family focused. The arrival of Zelda Rubenstein as Tangina is still a surprise, an awkward almost freakish woman invading the cookie cutter world of the Freelings. It may be mawkish but there are some great scenes - Diane discovering the supernatural powers in the kitchen, and Tangina’s other-worldly speech about spectral forces, for example - all underscored by Jerry Goldsmith’s heart-tugging music. But this film is all about parents protecting their children, allowing them to remain as kids unsullied by the events that happen to them.

No such fuss greeted the arrival of the 2014 remake of Poltergeist. Well, except for the armies of critics who queued up to bemoan the need for a remake at all and exercise high dudgeon at the injustice of it all. Most of these critics were probably too young to have seen the 1982 version at the cinemas and were busy defending their VHS memories. And let’s pause for a moment – there’s something in that. The original was made 33 years before the remake, so consider this:  if the 1982 movie had been a remake following the same time pattern that would make it an update of a 1949 movie – would critics have baulked at this? No, but because with the availability of film via an increasing variety of formats time has sped up, so thirty years now seems like just a remote click away – also the spread of ‘geekdom’ (and I’m not using that word pejoratively) means that there are a lot more people around who have an opinion on remakes these days, particularly on the potential bastardisation of one of their sacred cows.

Gil Kenan, director of the 2015 remake, was five when the 1982 Poltergeist was released. So he was probably one of the legion who saw the movie for the first time at home. His 2006 animated flick Monster House caught a little of the frenetic activity and childish wonder of the film he was about to remake, and 2008’s City of Ember cemented his reputation as a young person’s movie director. Which is exactly where the remake of Poltergeist establishes itself – it’s a young adult film, granted a 15 certificate in the UK (but a more accessible PG-13 in the US – once again showing that the American certification system understood the target audience, and was alive to the additional dollars that a wider certificate would bring). So it’s likely that the UK target audience for this film wouldn’t get to see it until it arrived, in whatever form, on their home TV set.

The most important difference between the 1982 and 2015 movies is tone. The Kenan version is very dark whereas 1982’s was quite the opposite. The remake also uses a lot of the 21st century horror movie clichés  – brooding chords on the soundtrack, a restless camera patrolling the house, and a lot of jump scares. The other thematic change is that the children are no longer the simpering offspring of the original, clinging to their parents. The kids in the remake are resourceful, plucky and smart. They are kids of the 21st century, and they make the 33 year difference between movies feel like a generational divide – which it is. Although the story and some key scenes are the same as the original, there are some important changes: the family, now the Bowens, have an aspiring writer mum and an out of work dad – far from being a successful household, they’ve suffered from the country’s recent economic downturn; the Tangina role is there but has been replaced by a TV ghost detective, Carrigan Burke - no room for strange little Zelda Rubenstein here (she died in 2010 anyway); the spirits are far more visible, shown as clutching hands behind the TV screen and then in more threatening form on the other side of the closet (yep, that rather hokey location is re-used in the remake – surely the basement would have been more in keeping with the modern feel?).

It’s perhaps the inclusion of key images from the original that weigh the remake down – the gnarled tree attack, the rope used to retrieve the daughter, the scary toy clown, event the haunted TV set itself – these were all effective in the 1982 version but appear clunky in Kenan’s film. The 2015 Poltergeist isn’t a bad film, just a bad idea. It would have been better to let the director free to make a film of his own – or maybe a live action remake of 2006’s Monster House would have been preferable – rather than restricting his talent by forcing him to remake a movie that, in my opinion, didn’t need to be re-made.

The Forest (US 2016: Dir Jason Zada)

A few reviewers recently have been bemoaning the rise of PG horror - scary movies that limit gore, violence and intensity to ensure they play to as wide an audience as possible - and including The Forest as a prime example of why this strategy doesn't work. There are lots of reasons why The Forest doesn't work, but it's nothing to do with toning down the content - the movie's been given a 15 certificate in the UK anyway, a classification which is a pretty broad church and which most modern horrors seem to get awarded. And there are plenty of films that are scary without being overtly gory.

No, first time feature director Jason Zada's The Forest doesn't work because it's a tedious, derivative and wholly pointless film, which makes absolutely no sense even as you're watching it (as opposed to those movies where you get a 'no sense' hangover trying to understand a movie after you've seen it).

Sara Price learns of her twin sister Jess's disappearance while teaching in Tokyo. Jess apparently took a class of kids into the infamous Aokigahara forest in the shadow of Mount Fuji, and disappeared. This place is known as 'Suicide Forest' because of the number of people who enter the area to take their own life. Refusing to believe that her sister has killed herself, Sara travels to Japan to locate Jess, enlisting the help of Aiden, a guy she meets in a bar and Michi, a park ranger.

The first thirty or so minutes of The Forest had me looking up various sources to confirm or deny that it was a remake of a Japanese horror movie, a habit so beloved by US film makers a few years ago. As well as the 'authentic' locations (although apparently Serbia stood in for Japan) we get the familiar homespun exposition delivered as warning - the forest contains spirits, unhappy ghosts of previous suicide victims, seeking revenge, who will cause you harm if you stray from the path etc. But this is no remake, although it may as well have been as it's so derivative. To be honest the early scenes were well set out, good to look at, and boded well for something, if not original, then at least engaging.

The trouble starts when Sara arrives at the forest visitor centre and shows a photo of Jess to the proprietor (yep, she shows a photo of her identical twin for recognition purposes). In a nice bit of cross racial profiling the lodge lady confirms that Jess has been found and takes Sara down to the basement morgue where a number of bodies are laid out under sheets. Bodies. In a morgue. In a tourist lodge. In summer. Now I know that the Japanese way of death is rather different to western traditions, but this is, well I was going to write ridiculous but that becomes relative once the film progresses. However in trad DEoL fashion I won't divulge any more of the plot, except to mention that the body in the morgue isn't Jess, Sara does stray off the path, there is a lot of screaming and running, and the audience is left wondering what is real, what is in Sara's mind, and did Jess really exist in the first place? You probably don't need me to add that I cared not a jot by the end.

Acting wise it's all fairly efficient if unremarkable. Gimlet-eyed Brit girl-who-is-in-everything-at-the-moment Natalie Dormer stars as Sara and Jess - you can tell the difference because Jess has dark hair, although they both have reasonably convincing US accents. She does a pretty good job of being scared, and the camera can't take its eyes off her (I still think she looks like a skinnier version of Charlie Brooks but that's probably just me).

There's a rather unsavoury footnote to all this. Apparently Aokigahara forest is an actual place, in the shadow of Mount Fuji in Japan, and is renowned as a suicide site - sources tells us that there can be up to 100 deaths a year here - and a number of the details about techniques used by the suicidal are included in The Forest. Nice. No wonder that the film makers had to find another country for their location. Now I'm not an overly sensitive person but this all left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. Not recommended for all sorts of reasons then.

The Survivalist (UK 2015: Dir Stephen Fingleton)

Stephen Fingleton's sci-fi film - his first feature - is that rare thing, a movie which communicates predominantly visually rather than via exposition, yet manages to convey important ideas about humanity and our ability to cope and adapt in the face of catastrophe.

Martin McCann plays the unnamed Survivalist, all skin, bones and animal wariness, who has carved out an existence in the years following an unspecified disaster (although we know from the clever opening titles shown by way of a two line graph that this catastrophe has been triggered by a sudden fall in oil production mixed with over population). He lives in a woodland hut and has become largely self sufficient, even down to manufacturing a form of oil for his lamps. He is ruthless in despatching anyone who threatens his solitude, burying their bodies for compost - he is also incredibly lonely, masturbating over photographs belonging to those he has killed.

Into this Robinson Crusoe-like existence appear Kathryn and her young daughter Milja, looking for food and shelter. Kathryn offers seeds and later Milja herself in exchange for sustenance and a roof over their head. The Survivalist's initial reticence gradually thaws as he enjoys regular sex with the young girl, but the three remain wary of each other - any one of them is capable of violence it seems - and lead a largely silent existence.

The backdrop to the formation of this uneasy family is the forest itself, verdant and tranquil yet containing hidden dangers in the shape of potential (and actual) assailants. The woodland is timeless and constant - as we watch it we're almost convinced that nothing has happened until we see the pitiful figures foraging within it. The rather staggering realisation that humanity has reduced itself to this existence (and in a later scene, a much worse one) in only a few short years since the catastrophe has taken place, as the eye is comforted by the green depths of the forest, is chilling.

As the film progresses rivalries develop, and the relative calm of the Survivalist's life is shattered - in fact we're now not sure to whom the film's title refers. In an environment of want and meagre resources, survival becomes paramount, and the film ends on a note which offers a possibility of hope and also a re-appraisal of what we've just witnessed.

The Survivalist is perhaps a more brutal and honest version of the 1975 BBC TV series Survivors - it's surely no coincidence that the titles are similar. Yet while that television drama often recalled the more cosy self sufficiency tactics of The Good Life, The Survivalist behaves rather like an adult version of Lord of the Flies. This is a strong, assured debut from Stephen Fingleton, with top notch acting turns from McCann, Olwen Fouere as Kathryn and the wraith like Mia Goth as Milja (who was so impressive in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2). Filmed in natural light and with no soundtrack, The Survivalist feels honest and bold - very, very impressive stuff.

The Carrier (UK: 2015 Dir Anthony Woodley)

Anthony Woodley's The Carrier has something in common with his last film Outpost 11 which after re-reading I find I treated pretty harshly. Both have science fiction themes but are more concerned with human drama than exploiting the fantastic side of things. So in Outpost 11 Woodley's cast are trapped bickering in a bunker in an alternative 1955, whereas in The Carrier his argumentative actors are cooped up in a 747 remaining airborne to escape the sudden spread of a quickly mutating virus on the ground.

The Carrier takes a while to find its tension and is rendered slightly confusing in that the viewer isn't given the benefit of understanding how the characters relate to each other until some time later. Some of the CGI is pretty unconvincing and I stopped counting the number of times where logic was cast to the winds, including the amputation of Billy (The Devil's Business) Clarke's arm, which understandably causes him intense pain at the point of severance but is seemingly forgotten several minutes later.

Eventually some tension is built up although as I mentioned it's achieved by all but jettisoning the sci-fi elements in favour of a 'who-do-you-trust' setup - in this I was reminded of the BBC series of Survivors (both 1975 and 2008 versions) which performed a similar trick. It was a mark of how limited the action was, that a sub plot involving the location of another plane (which isn't developed for plot reasons I can't reveal) was a bit of short term relief. Cast wise Billy Clarke is his usual unusual self (the Ken Campbell biopic awaits, Billy), but the rest of the cast, some of whom like Clarke are recycled from previous Woodley projects, remain pretty generic.

This isn't a terrible film but it does all feel slightly pointless. It's a step up from Outpost 11 but I still wouldn't say that Woodley is a director to watch.

David Bowie - a Southern Exploration

I have often wondered, perhaps somewhat morbidly, where I'd be when Bowie died. Implicit in this is the fact that I'd outlive him, which seemed a given when younger, but when someone dies aged 69 and you're 54, those 15 years don't feel like such a gap.

I didn't think I'd be unemployed, that's for sure, so when I heard the news this morning, my time was my own. My first instinct was to play all of my favourite (should be 'fave' I think?) records at mourning banishing volume. But then I dusted off Kevin Cann's book 'Any Day Now' - the exhaustive, almost day by day account of Bowie's formative years in the UK - picked up the car keys, and went for a little drive.

Everyone who was a fan (was? That sounds odd) has their own David Bowie, dependent on the age and the point in his career when they 'turned on' to his music. My own David Bowie was created in 1969, hearing 'Space Oddity' over the school Tannoy as part of an educational programme on space travel. Three years later, soon after the carrot topped, blue guitar swagger of Bowie performing 'Starman' on TV's LIFT OFF WITH AYESHA hit me for six - forcing me to rush out and buy the 7" with its dangerous and perhaps even more mercurial B-side 'Suffragette City' - I brought my copy of the single along to our primary school final year picnic, where the teachers had thoughtfully rigged up a record player to enhance the event. 'Starman' effectively cleared the picnic area - it obviously wasn't for everyone. My father, whose own version of David Bowie conjured him as a kind of Tommy Steele for the next generation, faithfully bought me all his albums when they came out, right up to the point where I asked Dad what 'lobotomy' and 'libido' meant because I'd heard Bowie sing the words. It didn't help that I asked him rather loudly in the middle of a party that my decidedly strait-laced parents were throwing.

40 Stansfield Rd

But back to this morning. So I've posted up a few songs (including possibly my all time favourite 'Conversation Piece') on social media like many other friends, and I'm still in shock. My David Bowie was the early version: 'She's Got Medals'; 'The London Boys'; 'Silly Boy Blue'. There's a shameless nostalgia operating alongside the grief, so I decide to take a drive around South London, Kent and Surrey to see if I can connect with my 'early years' Bowie, using Cann's book as my guide.

Stockwell Infants School

40 Stansfield Road, SW9, Bowie's birthplace, although he'd only live there for about six years, but the growing packs of media lurking in Brixton have decided that his beginnings must remain as urban as possible. When I arrive in the road, it's just me and a few photographers. Two streets along there's a bank of TV News outfits congregating, disgorging young teams all wearing regulatory puffa jackets - I wonder what their Bowie looks like?

106 Canon Rd

Round the corner is Stockwell Infants' school, where young David went to school for a few years. Luckily no-one (apart from me) is hanging around taking photographs. The school have put up garden centre screening to stop anyone poking their lenses through the bars. Back in Brixton the official mourning has begun - the Ritzy cinema changes its front of house to continue the SW9 reclamation of Mr Bowie. It's time to move on.

23 Clarence Road

It's difficult to gauge what it must have been like to move out of London into Kent in the 1950s. Nowadays the areas of the county bordering the capital are fairly built up, but even now as I drive away from SW9 there is a palpable change in the architecture and the density of housing which must have been much more acute 60 years previously. But these London hinterlands are where Bowie would grow up and make his first forays onto the live scene. His first house after Brixton was 106 Canon Road, Bickley, a rather sweet little town which, like so many places in the area, clusters around its railway station. This was his home for about a year. It's small, little more than a cottage, and quite a difference from the Stansfield Road address. So in 1954 the family moved up the road to a larger home, 23 Clarence Road, still in Bickley, but in a much wider street surrounded by detached 

4 Plaistow Grove

dwellings and an overall feeling of the private estate. This is absolute suburbia, and although the trains connect to central London stations, my guess is that the average inhabitant doesn't (or didn't). Bowie would remain here for just over a year, before moving to a slightly more connected address, immediately behind Sundridge Park railway station - 4 Plaistow Grove. This would be the home at which he moved on from junior school, securing a place at the all boys Bromley Tech in Keston (still in existence but now called Ravenswood, although it's a school still proud of its Bowie links including being the location for THAT fight resulting in David's permanently dilated pupil). It's also where he was living when he joined his first group - the Konrads - initially playing saxophone, but gradually moving to take over vocals.

The gig list at this time shows that the Konrads really worked the provinces. A few of the venues that were regularly used were Shirley Parish Hall, Wickham Hall and Justin Hall, part of St David's college - these venues were interspersed between Croydon and Beckenham. Presumably because of the distance from centrally connected transport, Bowie would be playing to a largely local Kent/Surrey crowd. Until 1964, when David would progress from the Konrads to the more R&B based The King Bees, this small and very quiet part of the south east would be his playground.

Justin Hall, West Wickham

Shirley Parish Hall, Shirley

Wickham Hall, West Wickham

Moving away from the provinces and back towards Brixton, I also move forward in time. I stopped first at the The Three Tuns pub in Beckenham. Now a chain restaurant, this was the site of the infamous Beckenham Arts Lab started in 1969, where Bowie developed some of his artistic tendencies. A young woman is standing outside with a microphone trying to get a sense of what Beckenham's Bowie is like.

The Three Tuns - site of the Beckenham Arts Lab

A few hundred yards away from this venue is the Croydon Road Recreation ground, an unassuming public space which was the location for the Beckenham Free Festival, held in August 1969 (and namechecked in the Bowie song). As I made my way to the bandstand, from where a permed newly blissed out Bowie once performed - a long way from the Konrads yet geographically just down the road - I saw that a few bunches of flowers had already been laid at its steps. An older woman was talking to a couple of local people as I approached through the mud; she also had a microphone and was clearly attempting to record some local memories of the man. I mentioned to them that Brixton was being seen as Bowie central today. She became annoyed: "But Bowie only lived there for a few years. He belongs to Bromley and Beckenham, not Brixton," she remonstrated.

Croydon Rd Recreation Ground - site of the Beckenham Free Festival

I walked away back to the car, thinking that everyone creates their own David Bowie, and that he'd be quite happy with that.

The Martian (US 2015: Dir Ridley Scott)

Mark Watney, one of a team of astronauts exploring the surface of Mars, is left for dead following a freak storm on the planet from which the rest of his crew manage to escape. Coming to after the storm, Watney realises he is alone on the planet, and after Mission Control back on Earth learn of his existence, they strategise to bring him back.

That's the fairly simple premise of The Martian, and to be honest 'simple' remains the watchword of this uneven but nevertheless reasonably entertaining sci-fi flick. Scott focuses much of the film on Watney, played by a slightly more animated than usual Matt Damon (who in the latter phases of his isolation - where the actor looks a lot older than his 45 years - reminded me of the unravelled Tom Hanks at the end of Paul Greengrass's 2013 movie Captain Phillips). Watney's Robinson Crusoe approach to his survival, rigging up a hothouse to grow his own food and using his scientific resources to work out how to overcome the tricky issue of communicating with Earth, is perhaps the most satisfying part of the film, although Damon's limited acting palette fails to fully capture the pathos and futility of his situation. It's when Scott adds in the other only very sketchily drawn characters - the occupants of the ship that abandoned him and the stressed Mission Control personnel - that the drama becomes rather fractured.

The last half of the film plays like an old fashioned disaster movie, but where movies of that genre would have delighted in showing off the hardware, Scott refuses to detail the mechanics, so we're left with all the tension being created by the actors - but this has neither the personal drama of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity (2013) or the ensemble tension of, say, Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995). The Martian is shot through with humour - some of it broad, some more subtle (even the title is not without levity) but this only serves to confuse - is this an action movie, a serious drama, or a film that shows that humour can be found in the strangest of situations?

Ultimately I wasn't convinced by The Martian, although I can't deny that it does look good. The depiction of Mars - actually Jordan - is particularly impressive (although I'm old enough to remember being wowed by a similar use of Death Valley in Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) - a film to which The Martian is also heavily indebted but so far unmentioned by the critics) and the detail of the scenes on board ship depict a crew at home in their surroundings and with their hardware - but then Scott's a past master at this. But thinking about the film afterwards, the confusion of styles and general messiness militate against it remaining in the memory for very long, and one is left thinking just how much of a return to form this is for Scott, who has, we should remember, only recently served up the dubious thrills of Prometheus (2013).

The Diabolical (US 2015: Dir Alistair Legrand)

You've got to be pretty confident when giving your movie a title like The Diabolical that it's not the word that's going to be used to describe it. In first time director Alistair Legrand's case I'm afraid it's just one of a lexicon of similar adjectives that will be trotted out to sum up this terrible genre mash up 'fright' flick.

Ali (Heroes (2006-10)) Larter plays Madison, a single mum struggling to make ends meet after separating from her violent husband, and being threatened with eviction by the company to whom her house is mortgaged. Her woes are added to by a series of threatening apparitions that pop up (and disappear) with almost nightly regularity. Baffled and frightened, Madison enlists the help of local scientist Nikolai, with whom she's been having a thing. After Nikolai witnesses the haunting he rigs up the house to film the goings on, which leads to Madison understanding that the apparitions are linked to the company wishing to repossess the house.

The fact that The Diabolical is being advertised as a blend of genres says a lot about the formulaic nature of many of today's horror films, and Legrand should be at least credited with trying something different. But the unevenness of tone and its shift from very un-scary spook movie to 'what the...did that just happen?' sci fi about two thirds of the way through is frankly embarrassing. I can't give too much away, but think The Terminator (1984), Millennium (1989) or The Frighteners (1996) and you're on the right track. Ali Larter is probably the best thing in this, eliciting genuine sympathy as a woman battling against bankruptcy while living in a haunted house, and convincingly portraying the protective mother role with the equally effective Chloe Perrin and Thomas Kuc as her young daughter and son. The rest of the cast are merely supporting players in a story which would probably have been better realised as an episode of The X Files (1993-2002). The audience response at the end of the showing I attended, running for the exits rather than sitting through a post movie Q&A with the inexperienced and obviously deluded director, says a lot.