It is almost insulting to me to review this ill-conceived remake of the 1982 classic. Basically if Poltergeist 1982 was conceived on the silk sheets of the White House master bedroom, then this remake was bastardized in the back of a beat up Volvo.

It is the remake that Ghost House have been threatening (yes threatening) to release since 2010. Some believed that common sense and good taste would prevail and the planned remake would rot in development hell. But as such unholy mistakes as the unforgivable ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ remake have taught us,horror remakes don’t deal in sense. Paris Hilton was cast in the remake of a Vincent Price classic for Christ’s sake..

Filmed in 2013 amongst much mutterings of malice from fans of the original 80‘s horror classic, the film can not hold it’s own against such scorn and pales in the shadow of such a beloved iconic horror.
This reboot firmly places the now ‘Bowen family’ in the new millennium. The teenaged daughter Kendra bemoans that a cell phone is a ‘Necessity not a luxury’ and later uses her iPhone to detect spirits. But all of the iphones, tablets and wide screen T.V’s can not match the vulgar tech porn obscenity of seeing a drone with a go pro attached to it soaring into the spirit world.

Unlike the original that it imitates so badly, this remakes gives us hollow characters empty of depth and impossible to empathise with. Husband and wife Abby and Eric depressingly ape the true pathos that existed between Mr and Mrs Freeling. Muttering some supposed flirty nonsense about ‘sad underwear’ as they try to create a realistic bond that the family can be built on, they fail. They fail hard. The children irritate, the para-psychologists sent to help them, buzz annoyingly in the background. And every single celebrated stand out moment from the original is given a heartless, hollow revamp.

The embarrassing, ill thought out, idiocy of this remake is crystallised in a scene where one of the Para-psychology students who have come to help recover the youngest Bowen child, gives a demonstration. In order to show them how The world of the dead exists along side the world of the living, she draws a circle on two pieces of paper and holds up the two drawings of circles, proudly displaying them and announces ‘See??’.

No GhostHouse, I do not see, I really don’t. This never should have happened.