"Poltergeist (2015)": Been There, Done That

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

What is the point of doing a remake?  This is the question I found myself asking as I watched the 2015 version of Poltergeist.  Sometimes a film can use an update to better communicate with a modern audience, but Poltergeist doesn’t really need that, as the terrifying appeal of a bunch of spirits haunting a family home is timeless as portrayed in the original film.  So why remake it other than to update the daily technology to more modern relatable appliances (and make a quick buck off name recognition)?  There sadly isn’t much of an answer to that.

The names are different, but the basic premise and plot points are still the same.  A family of five moves into a suburban home and the children begin to detect otherworldly presences with them in the house.  Strange things start occurring, such as televisions reverting to static, dolls moving on their own, and balls bouncing into frame.  One night, the haunting becomes so severe that the youngest daughter is pulled into the spirits’ realm, and the family must call upon the help of paranormal investigators to get her back.  Some details have been changed for modernity’s sake, such as a medium character being changed to a reality show ghost hunter and the use of a drone camera to take a look into the spirit realm, but more or less the nuts and bolts of the plot remain identical.

What I found most appreciated were the lighthearted touches that director Gil Kenan managed to slip into the first half of the film.  The slow build-up can sometimes be pretty dull in horror flicks, so it’s nice to see a director recognize that it’s fine to have fun with the premise.  Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt have wonderful chemistry as the haunted family’s parents, with witty banter that never becomes so ever-present as to pull away the building tension, but still gives them personality where they otherwise would have been stock archetypes.

That said, though, the film can’t help but be compared to its predecessor, and this is clearly the inferior film.  Many of the classic moments of the original film have been recreated to shrug-worthy effect, and other effects feel derivative of other recent haunted house flicks.  There’s nothing new here, right down to the obviously CGI ghosts that later appear, completely breaking the tension as the clean polygonal figures never escape the uncanny valley.

Overall, this new Poltergeist is technically proficient and effective, but utterly pointless.  With the recent renaissance of better crafted, low budget horror films, this not only feels like just another in a wave of lackluster studio horror projects, but it also doesn’t even serve as an adequate modern surrogate for the original.  It at least doesn’t often resort to jump scares, but that minor point cannot save this film from its utter lack of raison d’etre.  Give this one a pass and pick up the original.

"Lambert and Stamp": A Directionless Mess

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If you’ve ever read my reviews of documentaries, it’s likely apparent that I have a difficult time measuring the worth of a documentary, as I think the value that anyone is going to get from watching one is largely dependent on the subject matter.  So, on the off chances when I do watch a documentary, the question I find myself asking is “what about this film makes it good or bad as compared to any other documentary?”  And now, for the first time since starting my film critiques, I may have an answer in Lambert and Stamp.  This is a film that could have been much better, if only it had picked a thematic throughline and run with it.

Ostensibly this film is about the eponymous Kit Lambert and Christopher Stamp, aspiring filmmakers in the 1960s who struggled through obscurity in the film business.  They collaborated on an idea to get their careers off the ground: they would find a rock band and, through managing the band, would make a film about that band’s rise to fame.  This is how the duo became the managers of one of the most successful rock bands of all time, The Who.

Now, there’s a lot of material to work with in a premise like this.  There’s the relationship between Lambert and Stamp themselves, their relationship with the band, their personal lives, pretty much anything that any other biographical arc in a documentary would cover.  However, the star power of The Who pulls focus away from our supposed protagonists, making the most interesting parts of the film those that have to do with the band’s rise to fame, and not about the people who were responsible for it.

This is largely due to how the filmmakers decided to present the information they had archived, directly presenting rambling interviews with the surviving members of the band and Stamp himself (Lambert had passed away years ago) over archival footage of the band and, to a lesser extent, the managing duo.  This is all quite interesting as a historical glimpse at rare footage of The Who and understanding some of the backstage drama that went into the creation of such albums as Tommy and Who’s Next, but it splits the film’s focus between being a Who fan film and a character study of Lambert and Stamp, causing it to fail at being either very effectively.

This is a film that will work for you only if you are a diehard fan of The Who and are interested in seeing the rare footage this film has to offer.  In a sense, this also works as the film that Lambert and Stamp never got to make in their years managing the band, their whole purpose in pursuing management in the first place.  But for a film called Lambert and Stamp, it can’t seem to entirely commit to either a representation of the duo or a representation of the greatness they enabled.  As a result, it comes off as a bit of a directionless mess that most people shouldn't bother with.

"Results": Fails To Produce Even An Awkward Laugh

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Do you ever feel like there’s a joke you just aren’t in on, like the people telling the joke think they’re being incredibly funny but you just have no idea what they’re going on about?  That is perhaps the most concise summary of Results that I can provide.  Ostensibly a comedy that relies upon the awkward and uncomfortable performances of its cast, I never understood when I was supposed to laugh or what it was that drove the plot forward.  This film is a jumbled mess of half-formed jokes, and apparently that’s the punchline.

The story revolves around three people: Trevor (Guy Pearce), the owner of a local fitness center in Austin; Kat (Cobie Smulders), one of the personal trainers who works at said fitness center; and Danny (Kevin Corrigan), an average dude who has inherited an obscene amount of money and decides to spend some of it on hiring a personal trainer.  Beyond these broad character portraits, though, I couldn’t really tell you what Results is actually about.  It seems at first as though Kat and Danny are going to establish some sort of romantic comedy chemistry, yet Danny quickly comes off as creepy and disturbing in a way that I’m sure was meant to be endearing but feels manipulative and threatening.  Prior to abandoning that plot thread, Trevor feels vestigial until it suddenly comes to light that he and Kat had had a former sexual relationship, which the film had never hinted at until it suddenly becomes relevant and, although never quite the focus of the “story,” is apparently the key to the film’s happy ending.  The plot has the feeling of being made up as it goes along, and it’s difficult to keep up with all the new information casually spewed at you.

This has a lot to do with the film’s script seemingly being written for efficiency’s sake rather than immersive storytelling.  Characters don’t have much in the way of definitive personalities beyond their broad archetypes, and their dialogue often feels stilted and inhuman.  There were multiple times where a character started on Topic A, then immediately started talking about Topic C, but there was no transitional Topic B in order to make the conversation feel natural.

I think that this was perhaps done intentionally in order to accentuate the awkwardness of the characters and play it up for laughs, but the film never gets as far as making an actual joke.  The awkward situations aren’t intrinsically funny, and the uncomfortable tension never gets relieved by the saving grace of a punchline.  Instead, what results is scene after scene of these three characters interacting in a variety of manners that will make you question how they even got here, and thinking back on the experience isn’t ludicrous for comedy’s sake, but is only frustrating.

Maybe I just don’t get the joke.  Maybe I’m not pretentious enough to appreciate what this film has to offer.  But my gods, Results is an uncomfortable mess of a film with unlikeable characters, horrible writing, and an entirely misplaced sense of comedic timing.  This is one of the worst films I’ve seen all year.  It belongs with the likes of Wild Horses, Get Hard, and Serena.  It’s that bad.  Skip this movie.  It barely counts as one.