3.5/4  They're here!!!!!
In the seventies, Horror was the hot "genre" to make a film in. Musicals and family films were good fun but many people wanted danger and chills while watching a film that combines terror with fear. A combination most popular with The Texa... (read full)

4/4  Woah.
'Poltergeist' is one of the most frightening ghost films I have ever seen, it's far ahead of it's time when it comes to special effects and the film never slows down, constantly hitting us with more and more terror as the film moves on. Di... (read full)

3/4  CHECK WITH YOUR REALTOR FIRST
A good horror to not ignore. It's got its own unique appeal. What would you do if your house happens to sit upon the very portals of hell? When I saw this the first time, it scared the living soul out of me. Over time, however, it even... (read full)

3/4  85%
Action: 3/3 + Comedy: 1/2 + Good vs Evil: 1/1 + Love/Sex: 1/1 + Special Effects: 0.5/1 + Plot: 1/1 + Music: 1/1 = 8.5/10 or 85%.

Poltergeist premtpts many horror films on a grandiose scale. Pulse, White Noise, and the Ring are but a few... (read full)

2.5/4  Poltergeist Quick Review
Paranormal television terrorizes the atomic family unit and attempts to possess its young daughter. Genius.

3/4  Poltergeist Quick Review
You might think a collaboration between Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg would fall flat - but Potergeist turns out surprisingly well. Good scares, yet still keeps that kind of sweet Spielberg feel. Overall a solid effort.

4/5 Poltergeist- They're here....
  by Jose Lopez (Miami,Florida USA)
Poltergeist seeing as A Kid was impressive and downright scary. It's a Movie that you want to see during the day, It gives you the chills! Ghosts, Weird Things, Happenings, They do Exist. It's not Far Fetched as Perhaps UFOS? or Bigfoot. Movie is very Very Good. Great Acting too.A Classic!

5/5 A true ghost story classic that stood the test of time!
  by John Lindsey (Socorro, New Mexico USA.)


It seems like a typical suburbs with the Freeling family in California, the young 5 year old daughter Carol Ann (Heather Rouke) seems to be communicating with people in the TV. The parents named Diane and Steve (JoBeth Williams and Craig T.Nelson) are skeptical about the odd behavior going on at the house such as chairs moving by themselves, lights turning on and off on their own and plenty of other weird things, even the son Robbie (Oliver Robins) and teenage daughter Dana (Dominque Dunne) are weirded out by strange things in the house. It seems the house does have secrets from the past left untold including being near the cemetery as these ghosts seem friendly and playful at first. Later it turns out they abduct little Carol Ann into a vortex inside the house trapping her in as they purposely terrorize the family. They hire some paranormal experts (Beatrice Straight, Martin Casella and Richard Lawson) including a dwarfish psychic named Tagina (Zelda Rubinstein) to bring her back and clean the house of spirits.

Terrifying and original supernatural horror drama from writer-producer Steven Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper is one of the greatest horror movies of all time. It's based on Spielberg's old childhood fears even of ghosts then turned into a screenplay that got approved by MGM then directed by Tobe Hooper as it took nearly a year and a half to make, in June of 1982 along with Spielberg's phemeoneal ET sweeping the box-office by storm this movie came along and also became one of the highest grossing and most critically acclaimed movies of the year. Brilliant acting by the cast that even launched the career of Craig T. Nelson, excellent special effects that hold up today, a memorable score by Jerry Goldsmith and jolts galore in this non-stop rollercoaster ride of pure thrills and scares.

This Blu-Ray offers one hell of a transfer with terrific sound as it's in a book with a mini-behind the scenes look at this remarkable motion picture with a 2 part Documentary on actual poltergeists and the trailer.

3/5 Reviewing the blu-ray content, not the movie
  by S. Carr
1. I love this film, and this review is not a review of the film.

Okay...that out of the way. The extra features are horrible. No commentary? No behind-the-scenes?
The only extras are a couple documentaries about real life ghost hunting, which in my book equates to nothing.

However, the remastering is decent enough to warrant rebuying on blu-ray if you're a big fan of the film.

4/5 Great Blu-Ray...but not perfect
  by The Completist (Missoula, MT)
Most Blu-Rays are either great (The Road Warrior) or terrible (The Ninth Gate), so it's rare when I find one that underperforms juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a little bit; even a Blu-Ray with virtually NO special features has a magnificent picture (The Dark Knight) or some other compensation.

POLTERGEIST is one of these.

The transfer is great. I was 2 when it came out so I never got to see it as a big-screen experience and it is a revelation to see it as such: I liked this movie before and I LOVE it now. However, the transfer's not the problem...it's the master. I don't think they cleaned the film sufficiently when they struck the master because there's noticeable dirt and pinprick abrasions throughout the film: it's not terrible, or even plain bad...but if you are a videophile like me, it can be a bit unnerving. The worst part is the living room scene where they first speak to Carol Anne: there's a series of faded vertical scratches through the middle of the screen throughout the entire scene...I would have hoped they'd notice that and paint it out, but they didn't. Thankfully the scratches are thin and faint (and they don't show up again) so they're not unbearable, but they are irritating. The film is grainy, but in the good way (1980s film stock wasn't as sharp as it is today) although some grains seem a little larger than others at times...but I can't prove it.

As for special features, well, I think POLTERGEIST is never gonna have the special features it deserves due to the whole Spielberg/Hooper controversy, so I won't get my hopes up. Basically the picture reminds me of first generation DVDs of classic movies (the first Road Warrior DVD comes to mind)...much better than VHS, but it could be improved/cleaned up.

Colors, tones, blacks and all that other stuff seem to be fine. Aside from the maintenance issue, I don't see any other problems with this transfer and at $20 right now is a great find.

5/5 Masterful suburban horror film digs its roots in all over the place
  by Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast)
So this is one of those films that I "should" have seen a long time ago; it came out in the early summer of 1982, when I was 16, between my junior and senior years of high school. I didn't yet have my driver's license and lived 10 miles from the nearest theater, out in the country, so had to rely on mom or friends with licenses (of which I had none) to get to movies - and I had a minimal allowance and didn't work outside of the plentiful chores at home. Thus I didn't see a lot of movies, and I really had no interest in horror at that point, and didn't really know directors or writers. The fact that the guy who wrote, produced, and co-edited (uncredited) this film was the same guy behind my previous summer's favorite "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was just something I didn't catch. And for whatever reason, I've never caught up to it in all the years since, still not being a huge horror fan and no longer being a huge Spielberg fan.

But last night I finally did, and what was I thinking leaving this so long? This is Spielberg really hitting the core of his suburban-southwestern-America-as-the-world mythology, his nuclear family beset by strangeness and chaos from beyond, and hitting it supercharged on all cylinders. Interestingly enough the only reference to a specific place here is a quick mention of "I-74", which runs from Iowa to North Carolina - but the feel of the place to me wasn't much different than that of "E.T." or "Close Encounters", obviously the two films with which it has the closest affinity. It's Everywhere USA I suppose - everywhere outside of the Northeast, anyway. Flyover country.

Of course this is credited to director Tobe Hooper - the man behind "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Lifeforce" among others - but it feels Spielbergian all the way through, from the pans over the tract housing, to the cutesy kids, to the visual references to buddy George Lucas' work to the playing of one of Spielberg's favorite films, "A Guy Named Joe" on TV. In fact, the film opens with a TV, as the station goes off the air after midnight (I guess that'll date the film to many) and we're left with static. The story is pretty simple - a nice, young suburban family consisting of parents Steve & Diane (Craig T. Nelson and Jobeth Williams), and kids Dana, Robbie and Carol Anne (Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins and Heather O'Rourke) live in a modern, bland but very comfortable large suburban home and are beset by a demonic presence which eventually snatches Carol Anne away after some less harmful fun, leaving her parents to try to get her back through use of parapsychologists and a medium/mystic. The film builds rather slowly for its first half hour, then escalates pretty quickly - which works well because you'd wonder why the family doesn't leave right away otherwise. From about a third of the way in, it's a roller-coaster ride every bit as exciting as Raiders but there's a lot more going on underneath I think.

Steve and Diane love each other and seem to be fairly committed - this is a rare Spielberg happy family with few problems - on the outside. Sure they're a little distracted, they smoke a little too much dope maybe (this was a bit of a surprise) and they're not terribly concerned about the kids' nightmares at first - but there's nothing really wrong here that is their fault. Except that they're shallow and just don't seem to pay all that much attention to what's going on around them, don't seem to have much inner life. Spielberg and Hooper build the early part of the film quite carefully - subtle moments like Diane's comment to Steve to "reach back into our past, when you used to have an open mind" show us that this is a couple that has chosen this rather dull and conformist existence; later we start to feel that they also are going through life blindly and purposelessly. The one scene we have with Steve on his job (he's a salesman for the very same models of homes that he lives in) he seems a little distracted, uninterested, having to dredge up how to sell the home rather than really showing enthusiasm. The house the family lives in is the setting for over 90% of the film, their sanctuary, their only world.

But then the supernatural forces take over their lives - they have to let others in, and the "ghostbusters" (well, two of the three) show themselves to be very serious and very aware of what they might be dealing with. Beatrice Straight, as Dr. Lesh, the psychologist in charge, and Zelda Rubinstein as the psychic eventually called in to form something like an exorcism, are very clear that there are powerful forces - that they absolutely believe in but cannot truly understand - at work; that this situation calls into question our most basic beliefs - but it's never quite clear what if anything Diane and Steve believe in, other than their daily existence of working, sending the kids off to school, etc. At first I thought that the reclaiming of Carol Anne would have been a good ending for the film - but they have to actually go in and fight the monster lurking at the heart both of the house and their own shallow psyches, and though they escape physically unharmed, at the end the dream house is gone, and there is a palpable sense of defeat as the bloodied family retreats to a hotel, pushing the symbol of their solipsism, a TV, outside.

I haven't seen enough of Tobe Hooper's work to really be able to say that this fits in any way with his directorial "vision"; it's pretty clear that Spielberg's is an equal, if not the presiding, voice here. Maybe the photography is a little less pretty, maybe it's a little more gruesome and a little less sentimental than his other work, but whether that's coming from director or writer/producer I'm not sure I care - this is the most clear-eyed and pessimistic of Spielberg's early films, still plenty full of the gosh-wow (the FX look pretty good for a film of this period and the scares are still there) but on the whole a pretty harsh indictment of the shallowness of the suburban fantasy-life and of the denial and repression of history - as we find out, to no one's surprise, that the development our heroic family has been living in is an old burial ground, never de-consecrated, never forgotten, at least by the dead. They don't, in the end, manage to bring anybody over to the "other side" - but they do cause enough trauma to prevent any typical Spielbergian happy ending from glossing over.

Pretty much tied with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for my favorite film with Spielberg's name on it.