Midnight Movie: Poltergeist
Where: The Belcourt
When: May 29-30
Is this playful 1982 spookshow un film de credited director Tobe Hooper, whose abandon-all-hope masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the tonal (and total) opposite, or is it ghost work by co-writer-producer Steven Spielberg? Somehow I doubt anyone will care enough to argue whether the current remake is a Gil “Monster House” Kenan joint or producer Sam Raimi’s.
Especially with The Belcourt offering a well-timed revisit to the original, with Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as the suburbanites whose happy home is beset by spirits from the Indian burial ground underneath — and giant ant monsters, and killer klowns, and anything else the SFX dudes could shoehorn in. The jump scares still work just fine, but what’s really held up is the satire of TV saturation carried to absurdist extremes of alienation: neighbors dueling with remotes, parents addressing kids through a wall of televised white noise. With the late Dominique Dunne, the late Heather O’Rourke, the late Beatrice Straight and the late Zelda Rubinstein.
