Poltergeist
A 50 years old parable on how screentime in children is bad for them, delivered as a long stretch of PG-13 screentime. Ya’ know, fo’ kids!
Spielberg produced this, I wasn’t aware there was yet another Robert Zemeckis for Spielberg to dump his dross on. There’s absurd amounts of product placement, including for Star Wars, the FNG could not say no to the producer’s friends.
I’m even more shocked to notice this was directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre dude. So not even Zemeckis wanted this shit, this was a spec script?
I was expecting Friday the 13th or Halloween, but it’s actually Haunted House, an effects-driven extravaganza of a pious and modest nuclear WASP family in the suburbs, haunted by ghosts of “just people”, not an Indian burial ground. A thoroughly Christian film, the stay-at-home mom in the climax sports [Ripley](Alien){:inner-link}-like underpants and a baggy football shirt that remain glued to her body, like some Scooby Doo shit.
The “plot” is almost non-existent. Dad is a salesman that netted 35 million dollars of profit to his boss, and his return is a big house built on a graveyard. What a disgrace, the Protestant Work Ethic strikes again!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.