Caseus Archivelox: Poltergeist

2002-03-05
I remember watching this movie many times when I was a kid, and consequently having an intense fear of clowns. That one short scene caused me to hate clowns for as long as I can remember. It is not that I fear a clown attacking me; it is that I dislike people with their faces painted white, big orange hair, and shiny costumes. It was nice for the fact that it told me how to tell whether the storm was moving closer or farther to where I was.

Beyond that however, it is an incredibly effective (at least until an unnecessarily silly ending scene) ghost story. Almost nothing supernatural happens on screen, depending almost entirely upon somewhat strange occurrences that happen when characters look away. That is an interesting bit of the movie, as with the exception of the scene when the tree attacks Robbie, the scenes without the supernatural aspects are more effective than the ones with the special effected supernatural.

Throughout the movie, there is no character that we see the entire movie through, and we identify with most of the characters at one point or another, even with Tangina, the psychic who has never done in what she is supposedly an expert. As a young boy when I first saw the movie, I ultimately identified with Robbie, and when watching it this time, I realized how little of it really was about him, and saw it as identifying with everyone in the family at certain times, taking me out of the movie to a certain extent, because I was not as involved with one character as if it had focused on one character.