Here’s what I know or have heard about this. It is a reboot with entirely differently named characters. Sam Rockwell is in it and I love him in everything I have seen him in. I have heard that there are a lot of unnecessary jump scares, which I hate. And this has a 4.9 on IMDB and mostly negative word of mouth.
My biggest question is how do you fuck this up? I have seen so many reboots not understand what made the originals so much fun, or so brilliant. I fear that this will be the case here.
On the plus side, if they don’t mention Kane at all, I’d be thrilled. I doubt that they will. I speculate that had this succeeded, they probably would have had their own stupid ideas for sequels. This is horror, after all. I need something to chomp on and wake myself up. I decided on a pepperoni Hot Pocket and a piece of brownie if I want it.
Start Film
Okay, right off the bat, they are trying to bring back some of the whimsical feel, some funny with the youngest daughter saying dumbass twice. It works. Let’s meet the family. We have Eric and Amy Bowen along with their 3 children, from oldest to youngest, Kendra, Griffin, and Madison. They are going to see their new home. Madison is super stoked that there is a kitchen. Griffin is eyeballing the tree outside. Eric has been laid off from john Deere and Amy is a writer. Griffin is gonna get the Attic. Dude, you made out well. Madison is talking to the closet door. Eric doesn’t love this place, but there is some wiggle room on the price….and sold!
The static electricity in this house is real. Kendra is unhappy because there are no open malls nearby. This was 2015. You know what? That doesn’t seem too unrealistic, right? Also, she Facetimes with her friend and some guy named Carrigan Burke is on TV and he cleans haunted houses. Madison says that there are lost people in the closet that won’t open. I wish I had the attic when I was growing up. We had a decent attic that could have been really solid for having friends over. Griffin is a very nervous kid and needs a nightlight.
Griffin hears like a music box behind the storage door in his room. A bunch of clowns. Eric and Amy are about to get freaky, but Griffin interrupts. There is a squirrel in there too and that was our jump scare. Griff will not be sleeping up there so Amy’s panties will continue to be sad, as will Eric’s, I suspect.
The electricity in this house is very peculiar. So many toys and appliances are turning on. Is this Maximum Overdrive? Griff wakes up and hears Maddy talking to someone. You know how this goes. She is talking to the TV. She asks if Griff can come too. “They’re coming” and there are a bunch of handprints that show up. The house alarm goes off as Griff tries to unplug the TV.
The next day at breakfast, Amy wants to call an electrician. Eric is like, I can fix it. Maddy’s spoon is very bent. Kendra’s phone is fried and she blames Griff. Kendra demands a new phone like an entitled princess. they suggest that she gets a part-time job and she says sure, as soon as Amy gets a job. BOOM. I still think that I would be a great girl dad, but at a moment like that, I feel like I would just antagonize the girl.
Amy asks Maddy about who “they” are. She explains that they are lost people. Griff finds a bone in the front yard. Amy is kinda bad at everything so far. She is playing a game on her tablet, bumps into a crate of comic books and blames Griff. Well, Bitch, get off the tablet when you’re walking. I live alone and don’t do that shit. Also, a baseball rolls at Griff and it leads him to the bad closet. Second jump scare with a house of cards behind him for no reason. The jump registers as a 2 out of 10. I barely shrugged, but it was unexpected. But it was also incredibly lame.
Eric comes home with pizza and gifts for the whole family, despite have 2 of his credit cards declined. He bought a new drone, jewelry, a new phone, no idea what he got for Maddy aside from the pizza. This whole time Griff is being extra whiny. Amy calls Griff the baby of the family, hahaha. A bitch move, but I had to laugh.
Eric and Amy have to go to a dinner party. Eric is hoping that this may lead to a new job opportunity. Kendra is surprisingly a good babysitter. I didn’t see that coming. That may be the biggest jump scare so far for me. We find out at the party that the housing development was built on a cemetery. Okay, so we’re trying new things here. You have my attention. Eric is like, “isn’t it uncool to move all of those bodies” and the guy hosting, I think his name is Mr. Stoller says “Well, it’s not like it was an ancient tribal burial ground.” Okay, that is a funny callback to the original This guy should be called Mr. Teague.
Kendra’s phone is acting messed up and there are weird sounds. Will we get another jump scare? Jump scares are even better when you’re wearing wireless headphones because you’re trying to be respectful to your neighbors at 4 AM. Griff is freaking out at the storm outside. Will the tree try to take him? A door opened. I’d get out. Leave your siblings. Your parents can always make more, but they can’t make another you. This is where I mention that I am an only child. We’re in the laundry room. the floor is cracked and sludge comes up, then there’s a dead woman and a hand comes up from the floor.
Griff is freaking out at everything, including the trapped squirrel and the moving clowns. Once again, it’s okay to bail. A clown leaps and grabs Griff. The ceiling window breaks, and the tree is pissed. He checks on his sister like a good brother. The tree is scratching the window. There are noises in the closet. Now, Griff takes off to find Kendra, but leaves his sister in the F’d up room. I take back the good brother comment. Griff is stopped from going downstairs. Kendra is locked in the laundry room. Oh, the tree stretched from the attic all the way down a floor to get Griff. And Maddy’s closet doors are now open. There is an orange and a white floating light. Her toy pig is rolling into the closet. Maddy, you gotta rescue that pig! Okay, multiple lights. And she is deep in the closet and some hands come out and bodies take her away.
Eric and Amy return and see Griff in the tree screaming. How did none of the neighbors hear Griff? Kendra can’t find Maddy. The pig was in the closet. While everyone is frantically looking for her, Griff hears Maddy talk on the TV with a bunch of static. Griff puts Amy’s hand to the TV screen and Maddy puts her hand up. Kendra is having a breakdown. Amy wants to call the cops, but Eric is like, what are we really going to say?
They contact a paranormal investigator. Amy and Griff go to a school and meet these people Griff says this is his fault. So the paranormal team comes to the house. We have Dr. Brooke Powell, Sophie, and Boyd. All of these different names. I fully expect to mess up at some point and call them by their original names.
Boyd brags about recording a piano bench moving 10 feet over 7 hours. You can’t just catch that with the naked eye. He goes to sit and the chair is pulled out from under him and smashes into the wall. Haha. That was good. Powell explains that these aren’t ghosts, but rather a poltergeist because they are noisy.
Eric is puking up things, seeing things that aren’t there, etc. Boyd proposes to Griff that Eric may be faking this to make money and do a reality show. Griff shuts that noise down.
Boyd needs to set up the heat sensor in the bad closet.Boyd goes to use a power drill and it gets sucked into the hole, as well as the cord. Boyd is okay with putting his arm in there blindly. But then he gets pulled to the wall. His face is hugging the wall. The power drill gets closer and closer. And then he is free. The heat was rapidly decreasing. He was inspecting his arm after.
Powell is trying to explain the astral planes, and Sophie tries to explain this concept. Griff suggests someone going there and leading her back here. Amy is trying to get Maddy to talk. Finally, Maddy speaks. Maddy says that she is surrounded. The power goes out. Then the light shows a shadow of Maddy in various rooms. Eric gives chase, but Powell discourages this. This leads to Maddy’s room and that damn closet. Eric finds “Maddy” in the closet. Yeah, there’s a jump scare that was predictable. So now Eric breaks the closet wall and a bright light shines.
Griff notices something weird in the ceiling. A piece of the table that he hucked into the hole just came out of the ceiling. They need help, as in Carrigan Burke. Carrigan is the new Tangina? Kendra is pumped.
This guy has been in some stuff that I have seen. Jared Harris is the actor’s name. Kendra is ridiculous but in a funny way. He goes around inspecting the house, the laundry room, the ceiling portal, and Maddy’s room. Carrigan suggests that Maddy may have a gift because she is 6 and at her purest. Carrigan doesn’t believe that the bodies were ever moved, just the headstones. He explains that the angry mob of spirits need her as a lantern to lead them to the light.
Time to set up the rope and fill the tub up. If you know the original, you have idea. Everyone is getting a GPS tracker. Neat idea. They get a mattress for under the portal. Carrigan has a messed up leg and he needs to learn how to fly Griff’s drone. We discover that Carrigan and Powell used to be a couple. It’s go time.
They use the rope as a bridge, and this is the only way to find their way through. Then they use the drone to find Maddy. Will something electrical like that function in the astral plane? The video gets distorted as it approached the bedroom. This looks pretty cool and is a neat idea. We see bodies moving around, a lot of them. They see Maddy on the heat camera. Then she promptly is attacked. Griff is gonna go in while the adults argue about who’s going in. Time to go downstairs and get ready for the girls to all pull on the rope.
Griff finds the drone and Maddy, but he lets go of the rope. She says that they can’t. There are 100s of bodies there. The top breaks from the bedroom. Griff grabs Maddy and they follow and exit the portal. They end up in the tub. Griff wakes up. Maddy is awake. Amy, bet you won’t talk shit about Griff ever again.
The Bowen family pack up and get in their vehicle to leave. Kendra asks Carrigan to state that the house is clean. so he does. Maddy says that the house isn’t clean though. The spirits never went into the light. They try to leave, but they can’t leave the minivan. They are tipped upside down and pulled back into the house. Damn. Maddy is missing.
Maddy gets dragged back upstairs. Amy goes running up. The whole family is pulling on Amy who has hold of Mddy. The spirits are grabbing onto Maddy. Carrigan is yelling at the spirits. Carrigan is breaking back into the house to rescue the family. The spirits are on TV. Eric gets the family out the window. He sees Carrigan enter the closet. Eric gets out through the window. Shit is going beserk outside. They get into Powell’s vehicle to take off.
Griff looks back and a big explosion comes from the house and a ton of blue light. Eric is just trying to escape. Police and firetrucks approach. Maddy has her pig. Powell is a crying mess. Sophie and Boyd are trying to find a sign of Carrigan. He shows up on the GPS.
Then it’s the next day. The family is looking at a new home and the realtor talks about closet space. Maddy says “The last closet ate me.” Hahaha, that may be the best line of this film. The realtor shows off the house, it is too similar, plus a nasty tree.
We get credits, but then we see Carrigan is back to doing his TV show and Powell is now on it with him, but she messed up. that was awkward and not funny. I am not sure what point that served other than to let us know that Carrigan made it out okay. Why the need for him to act irritated though?
End Film
You know what? This wasn’t all that bad. As a matter of fact, for a reboot, this is pretty decent. We’ve seen so many bad reboots and a handful of good ones. This isn’t as great as the original, but is there even a point in saying that nowadays? How many reboots are as good or better than the original from th epast 20 years? I’m guessing you can count them on one hand.
One criticism that I really on the fence about was Sam Rockwell being in this. Sam is a great actor, one that I absolutely love to watch. I legitimately wonder if the role was written for him. If another actor comes in and tries playing that same role that way, this movie is significantly worse. There’s no denying that. Do I think that this was a waste of Sam’s talent? In some ways, yes. He is just too talented for this type of film, but if he wasn’t in this, I wouldn’t have been nearly engaged. So overall, I think that this was a positive.
Let’s get the inevitable comparisons out of the way, shall we? The dads are pretty even, but I think that they gave Sam more to work with. JoBeth as the original mom was better, but I still loved the insult that the new one threw at Griff. The older sister role, Kendra gets the nod over Dana simply because she was given more to work with. Robbie was better than Griff because of how wimpy they made Griff. Robbie was scared, yes, but not to this degree. Carol Anne vs Maddy, I can hear people now. If he chooses Maddy over Carol Anne, I’m done. Much like with the dads, I think that this is pretty even. Carol never got the great one-liners that Maddy got, to be fair, and Carol was a better victim. I think both did very well with what they had. The paranormal terms are kind of a wash because Boyd and Powell were semi interesting, but I thought Lesh was really good in the original.
Then there is one final character battle: Tangina vs Carrigan. I liked Carrigan a ton. He was very fun, great acting. He fit the reboot’s demeanor better. But he wasn’t Zelda Runinstein, and he never had a chance. Zelda was haunting at times with her portrayal of Tangina, and arguably the lynchpin of the original cast. The reboot did the smart thing to not try to recreate Tangina, but there was no way to win.
The other thing to compare are the houses and special effects. The original had one scary ass clown and it got its time to shine. the reboot is like, let’s have 20 clowns and lessen the impact. The tree in the new one was stronger in that its branches could extend like Inspector Gadget, but it wasn’t as sinister. The closet was cooler in the original. The house and set pieces in the original were just better overall, even with modern special effects. Perhaps that is where the reboot falters the most.
Wait, no that’s not it. This one falters the most with telling everyone that the house is built upon a cemetery far too early. It’s a great twist, and it was like 33 years later, you can keep the same damn twist. It would have worked if the reveal came later. That really sunk my battleship.
Still, as a movie, it stands on its own. It is better than the sequels. I would watch this family again. It’s been 7 years, so I doubt that we will. I would watch this again, I really would, happily.
Final Rating: 6.0 – I almost went 5.9, but this feels like it belongs with the 6’s of the horror world.
All the pictures used in this blog are for review purposes. They are the property of:
- Fox 2000 Pictures (present)
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (presents) (as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (present) (as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
- Ghost House Pictures (production)
- Vertigo Entertainment (production)
- TSG Entertainment (made in association with)
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