The Poltergeist (2015) - Disappointing Remake

Unfortunately I must inform any of those who have not seen this film that it was a disappointment. After having mixed expectations about this film, I went to the cinema thinking it would probably be a disaster but hoping it would be decent. I am a huge fan of the original and it is one of my favorite horrors, therefore I was interested in seeing what it would be like. Whilst it wasn't utterly dreadful, I must say that I was not impressed. Across the web it receives fairly low ratings:

• IMDB - 5.1/10
• Rotten Tomatoes - 32%
• Metacritic - 47%

In my opinion, I would say that the IMDB has an accurate score for this film, and perhaps Metacritic are close to my opinion however to be completely honest I believe Rotten Tomatoes are criticizing too heavily.

The film is directed by Gil Kenan and follows a similar plot to the original, lasting 93 minutes. A young family is visited by ghosts in their home. At first the ghosts appear friendly, moving objects around the house to the amusement of everyone, then they turn nasty and start to terrorize the family before they "kidnap" the youngest daughter.

As expected, the plot is very similar to the original and unfortunately had few strong features. One thing that I must admit that was fairly impressive were the camera angles. Some scenes were shot at angles which allowed the audience to question whether there was something waiting behind a character or not which I found quite thrilling. Another positive aspect was the suspense level. Although I didn't find it very scary, I thought the suspense was there. There were plenty of scenes with dead silence which made it incredibly eerie at times.

Although I've mentioned few positive aspects about this film, I must say that the negative aspects unfortunately outweigh the strengths. This film plot is almost identical to the original which is disappointing as you would expect at least a few small changes. Another thing that I was disappointed by was the clown which appeared way too many times in the trailer, yet it was only in the film for no more than 20 minutes. After watching the trailer, I was excited to seeing the creepy clown a lot however we rarely seen it after a few occurrences. I also thought that it was very unrealistic near the end. When the house was being completely trashed up I thought it was really bizarre how none of the neighbors were outside curious and terrified of the wreckage of the house. Was it just me or did you all think this? Another minor negative aspect I encountered was that I felt it was a bit slow. Even when it did speed up I felt as though the film was very short and overall I expected a bit better.

Whilst I clearly knew that it would never beat the original, I was optimistic in that it may be an average modern horror but I was wrong. I was disappointed with this remake as I really enjoyed the original and so I would not recommend you to watch this ahead of other popular modern horrors such as Insidious and Sinister.

Overall Rating - 5.2/10