Poltergeist

If this patently unnecessary but extremely well-made remake of Poltergeist was presented as one of the innumerable rehashes of the 1982 PG-horror classic instead of as a full-on remake, it wouldn't have received nearly the critical drubbing it got this week. As in the Tobe Hooper original, a middle-class family moves into a quiet suburban neighborhood, and finds that their home is haunted by an angry presence that takes the youngest child hostage. In almost every sense, Gil Kenan's version falls short of Hooper's, and doesn't do enough to differentiate itself, other than updating the technology and changing the parents (Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt) from hippie sellouts into credit card-wielding Gen X-ers hit hard by the recession. But for all of the script's tentativeness, Kenan (Monster House) brings a high level of craft to his haunted house film, matching recent overhyped ghost stories like The Conjuring and Insidious. D.B.