Evil clowns. Do I need to say more? Seriously. Evil pull-string toy clowns that come to life and attack. Normally, I probably would advise that coulrophobics like myself avoid the remake of Poltergeist. Seeing as it is a horror, however, put that one in the plus column. The Bowens bought a house on land that used to be a cemetery. Actually, it never ceased being a cemetery (they just moved the headstones), which probably came up when they were building the foundation for the house. Oh, there’s a whole
lotta lawsuit here, doncha think? Of course, that isn’t their immediate problem. Their immediate problem is that the house is haunted, oh, and they have no income, so they either gotta charge the ghosts rent or figure something else out. As is standard with ghost tales, the horror starts soft. A tree root spontaneously spouts, a noise comes from the hideaway, the child talks to the wall, then the closet. Clowns appear. Who the f*** leaves a box full of toy clowns behind? That is just evil. Then the child talks to the television when nothing is on. And check it out, something is on the television … and the television is unplugged. Uh oh. What do you do when “imaginary friends” are neither imaginary nor friendly? Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt have the unfortunate distinctions of being parents in a horror film. Why, Sam, why? Aren’t you better than this? Kennedi Clements is the six-year-old that gets sucked into the closet of no return. When selecting rooms for your children, you might not want to give your 
six-year-old daughter the one where the closet doubles as a gate to Hell. Just thinkin’ out loud here. Do you suppose that’s a first world problem? Try as it might, the Poltergeist doesn’t quite have the same evil/hopeless feel as the original. The film has a little fun with Jared Harris as the TV personality soothsayer – perhaps that’s the problem. What scared us in the 80s seems fairly mild TV these days. Sure, evil clown toys, and you gotta love the tree that breaks into the house to claim a child. But at the end of the day, the tree gives the child back. If you haven’t seen this tale before, it will probably scare you a little, but only the clown doll will make you cover your eyes.
The Bowens find their house is a fail
Contains enough eerie to elicit quail
The tot sucked from bed
Now trapped with the dead
Pretty sure that’s gonna hurt the resale
Rated PG-13, 93 Minutes
D: Gil Kenan
W: David Lindsay-Abaire
Genre: Unnecessary remake
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Horror junkies
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Coulrophobics
