Poltergeist

Here’s a tip for you – if the lights in your home keep turning on and off of their own accord and your six-year-old daughter is sucked into the television set, possibly never to be seen again, the chances are you’ve got poltergeists.

So what to do? Well, I suppose the smart move would be simply to give up the kid for lost and move house. But that’s not what the Bowen family – mum Rosemarie DeWitt, dad Sam Rockwell plus three children, including the now vanished six-year-old – does in this remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film.

What the family does instead is try to get their daughter back, first with the aid of Dr Jane Adams from the Paranormal Research department of the local university. (Hey, doesn’t every university have a Paranormal Research department?) She turns up at the Bowen house with two assistants and a load of technology, but she’s not much help. The poltergeists are still at it, hurling stuff and children around.

So, as a final resort, Adams calls in her ex-husband and celebrated poltergeist hunter, Jared Harris, whose body seems to be covered with scars from violent previous encounters with the reluctant dead. And he reveals that the whole suburban estate on which the Bowens live was built on a former cemetery, and the poltergeists have been summoned up by seriously peed-off corpses, furious that ticky-tacky houses have been shoved up all over their last resting place.

But precisely why they picked on the Bowen family is never revealed. It’s a big estate but none of the neighbours’ homes seem to be affected. In fact I’m not at all sure there are neighbours; we certainly see houses very close by, but we don’t see any people.

And there’s no indication that anyone is so much as peeping out from behind lace curtains, even when the supernatural action in the Bowen house is at such a pitch that you think it’s about to explode.

On which point you wouldn’t believe how destructive poltergeists can be. They aren’t content with just throwing things around and making toy clowns attack small boys; they bash through walls and ceilings and turn cars upside down, and you just hope the Bowens have taken out home insurance that will cover it all.

Now, how all this ends is something you might want to find out for yourselves. In any event I’m not going to tell you, although I will say that this film, directed by Gil Kenan, is not as good as the original, which was highly regarded by the American Film Institute. I very much doubt that this one will be.

Indeed, the only thing that stops me wondering why anyone bothered to make it in the first place is that Hooper’s film, which modern teenagers have probably never seen, is 33 years old and made a lot of money. And the prospect of coining even more money, dearly beloved, is the only reason why we’re constantly offered so many sequels, prequels and remakes.