The Monkees in Monstrous Peril #1: "Monkee See, Monkee Die" (1966)

The Monkees: Monkee See, Monkee Die (1966)
Dir.: James Frawley

The release earlier this year of the first new Monkees album in twenty years, Good Times!, has had me delving back into my own Monkees collection of various items, whatnot, and folderol. Having been a fan of the group since I was but a child, I was handed down the group's early records from my cousins, after I presume they had gotten a bit older and grew into more presumably mature music (that I also ended up inheriting at a certain point). But while their music did enter my life at a pretty early age, the real reason I was a Monkees fan was because of their TV show.

The Monkees ran for two seasons on NBC in primetime from 1966-1968, and it is likely I may have seen it that young. But where I really encountered the show was on Saturday morning television, where repeats of the show's 58 episodes ran on CBS from 1969-1972, and then on ABC for the 1972-1973 season. The show went into full syndication after that starting in 1975, and whenever we got the chance, my brothers and I were watching the Monkees run around like crazy every weekday afternoon.

Naturally, in their trail of hijinks throughout the sitcom landscape, and given the highly fanciful nature of most of their television material, the Monkees landed into a few scenarios of a more monstrous nature. So it comes as no surprise that in the very second episode of the series (and fifth filmed counting the pilot), the boys were already stuck inside of a haunted house. At the start of Monkee See, Monkee Die, the band is practicing in their apartment, the design of which really dug into my soul as a child and became a source of emulation from that moment onward.

There is an angry knocking at their door by their landlord, and he warns them about paying the rent and threatens them by saying his lawyer will be bringing them an eviction notice. Seconds later, comes another knock, and it is indeed a lawyer comes to bring them something. Thinking it is the landlord's man, they each get into disguise: Mike (Nesmith) becomes a hard-of-hearing old codger; Micky (Dolenz) is a "23-hour doorman. I used to be the 24-hour doorman but I couldn't take the long hours"; Davy (Jones) has resorted to imitating Whistler's Mother by knitting and rocking in drag in the corner; and Peter (Tork) is a joke-cracking TV repairman. When they find out who the lawyer really is and that an eccentric millionaire on Cunningham Island has left them a legacy, they quickly switch their outfits and present themselves properly. His response? "When you see the Monkees, tell them I called."

Following the opening theme sequence, which is truly a time capsule item for television history, we see a spooky looking old mansion, with bats squeaking past the boys – clad in their classic eight-button red shirts with turtle neck sweaters underneath – and lightning flashing as the Monkees enter the front door. We are clearly in The Cat and the Canary or The Old Dark House territory in this one, though with the Monkees, the show can zigzag in any direction it wants at any given time. They are frightened by Ralph the butler, who tells them they are in time for the reading of the will. Mike questions why they are even at the reading when they had never even met the late John Cunningham, "even when he was early," but Ralph corrects them. He tells them that they once returned a wallet containing $600 they had found to him. When Micky mentions that Cunningham must have appreciated their honest, Ralph says, "Oh no, because it wasn't his wallet."

They meet Madame Roselle (a quite terrific Lea Marmer), a psychic who attempts to tell the future by shaking what looks like a crystal ball (but is really a snowglobe), and says "We'll have snow tomorrow." They next meet Mr. Kingsley, Mr. Cunningham's "walking companion," author of titles such as Beverly Hills on 5 Shillings a Day and Utica: City on the Move. And finally, there is Cunningham's grand-niece, Ellie Reynolds (Stacey Gregg), a cute British girl that allows Davy's eyes to sparkle for the first time in the series (which will happen quite a lot during its run). Her eyes sparkle back, I must add. Unable to divert Davy's attention, Mike yells in his ear, "Statistics prove that two out of three teenage marriages end in divorce!" It doesn't help. Micky says "Three out of three!" Mike yells, "Four out of three!" Finally, Mike declares, "He's in love for the first time... today."

Mr. Cunningham has recorded his will on an old-style phonograph record, and while Kingsley and Roselle bicker over whether the mansion has been left to them, the Monkees are told they have been left the library organ with the stipulation that they play at least one song on it. (I am sure that will be pantomimed at some point very soon.) Everything else in the mansion is left to Ellie, but she has to spend at least one night in the mansion before she decides to keep it. (Well, of course she has to... this only happens in spooky old mansions.) The Monkees decide to play their one song on the organ and get out of there, not wishing to spend the night in such a creepy place.

As the trio of obvious villains – Roselle, Ralph, and Kingsley, leer at them from behind a statue – Peter sits down at the organ, lifts the lid over the keys and starts to play... a song that doesn't even have anyone playing the organ on it. It is one of the Monkees' biggest and most recognizable hits (and their first of three #1 singles), Last Train to Clarksville, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. In fact, on the actual The Monkees album, the only Monkee to appear on the song is lead vocalist Micky Dolenz, the rest of the music being played by Boyce and Hart's band, the Candy Store Prophets. But in what basically constitutes an early film of music video for the song, the Monkees are not only seen singing along to the track, but also playing the song in what seems to be pretty able form (at least for selling it on camera). Planes, trains, dune buggies, unicycles, jetpacks, motorcycles, carousel animals, and even the Monkeemobile are employed to sell the importance of transportation to the story of the song, even though it is just about a train.

When we return to the story proper, Mike says, "Well, I hate to inherit and run" but Ralph warns them that they may be stuck on the island due to the "foggy season". Mike questions when this might occur, and Ralph says, "It's hard to estimate, sir. I'd say, approximately, from 1820 to 1975." The boys are next seen staying the night and have switch to pajamas, and Peter gets the best outfit of them all: giant orange pajamas with a big blue bunny on the breast and an orange nightcap to match. The second they turn out the light, they hear rumbling and creaking and fog pours in through their open window. They turn it on, and decide to shoot fingers to decide who is going to keep watch. Standing in a circle, they throw their hands at each other, saying "1, 2, 3, shoot!" On the third try (I am not sure how they were determining who was chosen), a fifth hand appears... one that is fully covered in fur and has long claws!

The boys scream and run for cover as they realize there may be a monster loose in the mansion, and wild growling follows them out of the room! They hear howling noises while they walk down the hall, and then Madame Roselle steps out to say she had a vision about the butler. She says he might have gone on a long trip or be dead, but when they ask which one, she then says flippantly, "Six of one or half a dozen of the other." Gunshots are heard, and everyone runs downstairs. In the walls of the ballroom, various knifes and scythes are seen sticking into the walls. They assume that because of the signs of violence and because he hasn't shown up that Ralph must be dead. They try to call the police but the phone's cord has been cut and tied in a bow. "Well," says Micky, "at least we know the murderer is neat." Micky examines the blades in the wall, and calls Davy over. When he arrives, the two of them are seen dressed as Holmes and Watson, having a shared detective reverie. It is broken up when they have to stop Kingsley from torturing Ellie by asking her about which of his books she has read (for the record: Dining Out in Greenland, Picnic Spots Along the Ganges, and Philadelphia: Where to Find It; it's a pretty good running gag).

Mike uses bread crumbs on the sill of their window to attract a carrier pigeon so they can send a message for help. The bread crumbs work, but when Mike picks up the pigeon, he discovers there is already a message attached to its leg. He opens it to read it aloud to the others: "Please do not strap a message to my leg. I am not a carrier pigeon." Next, Mike lays down giant bones in the hallway to attract a St. Bernard so they can use the dog to rescue them. When Peter asks him where he got the bones, Mike says he found them in the closet. The boys are skeptical that the plan can work, but then a St. Bernard dog, complete with brandy barrel, does show up through the doorway! He completely steps over the bones, however, and comes up to Mike, who notices that there is already a message attached to the dog's collar. Mike reads, "There is a message for you on the pigeon" and gives the camera a very perturbed look.

A while later that night, the boys have managed to fall asleep, but then there is a loud gunshot noise. Mike waves it off as a car backfiring, but when the others ask him where, he says, "In the next room." They all freak out, and then hear another shot. They all start to run in circles, as Madame Roselle enters the room to announce she has had a vision that Kingsley will be shot in the next ten minutes. They tell her they just heard gunshots, and she looks at her watch and says it must be slow. In desperation, Micky uses his crazy inventing skills to reconfigure the telephone equipment to contact the outside world. He gets a man with a foreign accent, and possibly on a submarine, who can only answer "Yes, I do!" to every question, even the last one, "What's your location?" Roselle holds a seance, where they all join hands and try to reach the spirit of John Cunningham. Weirdly, she ends up on a party line, and after first reaching an answering service, she contacts the Ghost of Christmas Past instead, who insists on calling her Ebenezer. The lights suddenly go out, so Micky lights a match and holds it to the faces of everyone at the table. Mike, Davy, Ellie and Peter are still there... but no Madame Roselle remains. All five turn to the camera, and the Monkees say in unison, "She's gone!"

The next morning, all seems fine, except for the three missing persons, and Davy helps Ellie out with her luggage down the stairs. The other Monkees are seen pushing the library organ through the front door while a pair of eyes are watching them through a painting in the tradition of many other haunted house stories. Mike decides it might be best that while they wait for the ferry to play some music to cheer everybody up. Mike straps on a guitar and Peter hits the organ. As Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day starts, we see the Monkees in different costumes running about, seemingly chased by themselves (in the eight-button shirts) wearing a series of monster masks. We also see them wearing diving equipment in a swimming pool, Davy dressed as an Indian, and a lot of goofing around with bows and arrows and toy guns as they run around the estate. At different points, Davy is dressed as Tarzan and frightens off whoever is wearing the werewolf mask, and Mike gets a rubber arrow through his head and falls down to the ground, after which Davy (as the Indian) scratches a mark on his bow. At tail end of the song, the Monkees with the monster masks gather, but there are five of them. Mike, Peter, Davy, and Micky each remove their masks, until there is only someone wearing a Dracula mask left. The other run in fear while he stands there in confusion.

Back to the story, Mike asks if everyone is OK now, but they all answer in the negative. Celebrating is heard inside the mansion, so the boys sneak up to the window to find Ralph, Kingsley, and Roselle sipping champagne, thinking they have successfully won the mansion. They see a monster hand through the window, and see it is attached to Ralph, who picks up a glass. Davy asks Micky if he still has "those knockout pills you've been experimenting with?" and Micky says, "Yeah, but the experiments aren't complete yet." "They will be soon," says Davy. Disguising himself in a suit of armor, Davy drops the pills into the liquor, of which the creeps soon partake. The villains hear the Monkees makes some noise outside and Ralph comes out with a gun. Peter holds up his fingers like a gun, and says, "Stop or I'll shoot!" When Ralph steps forward, Peter pretends to shoot... and Ralph drops to the ground, the pills having taking effect. Kingsley and Roselle come out to confront Peter and the same happens to each of them.

Peter twirls his hand in victory (Mike subtly makes sure the finger is not pointed in his direction), and when Ellie notices the villains are still alive, Davy lets her in on what has happened. He mentions that the noises were the three of them all along and that there is nothing to be afraid of anymore, not even ghosts. Suddenly, the booming voice of the Ghost of Christmas Past speaks from the top of the stairs: "Keep the Christmas spirit alive, Ebenezer!" The Monkees and Ellie scatter out of the mansion! Later, they tell a policeman the whole story and are given their leave, just as Kingsley comes to and starts to pester the police about which of his books they may have read. End credits.

I made a beef a couple of years ago about whether they should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While it would be really cool if they were, I also understand the arguments against it, even though there are criteria that have been used to get far less successful acts into the Hall that the Monkees completely meet. The chief thing holding them back is the notion – only partially wrongheaded – that they were a band solely created for a TV show, and that they didn't play their own instruments (which they did... eventually, and could from the start).

I have often wondered how the Monkees comedy plays with today's audience. I know how it plays with many of my friends – rather all over the board in tastes, but I know that many of them enjoyed the show in their youth and hold fond memories of it – and I know that The Monkees show forms the basis of much of the comedy that my brother and I preferred in our youth. I still find the four Monkees completely charming as a performing unit, and the show has lost little for me in over forty years of revisiting the show.

Which then made me realize that I don't really care how it plays with today's audience, because most of today's audience, even with the release of a new Monkees album, doesn't really know or even care about the Monkees anymore. Sure, the band will always pick up new fans along the way, but those are not the norm today. And unless the band hired me to promote them, why should I really be all that concerned about it anyway. Their legacy and reputation is their own concern (or not). I've got my own life to worry about now. My only stakes in continuing to follow a band from my youth is whether or not I still enjoy their music, and whether or not I can still watch a remarkably silly episode of an exactly 50-year-old television show and still get a similar feeling of enjoyment out of it that I did when I six or twelve or twenty-seven or forty.

And the answer is yes. Because I still love the Monkees. Sparkly eyes, sparkly eyes.

RTJ

And in case you haven't seen it...

Recently Rated Movies: A Hodgepodge of Varied Horrors

I watch a huge variety of films throughout the year, in nearly every possible genre, and from nearly every decade in film history. My need to complete any number of film lists (some from other sources and books, and some of my own devising) has me hopping about in nearly every possible direction to check ever more films off of those lists in a relatively consistent fashion.

However, around September and October, my choices tend more towards horror and science fiction, or variants thereof. It is the one time within the calendar year where I actively try to keep within those genres exclusively. Hence, the trio of absolutely unrelated films that I have seen over the past week, reviewed briefly below...

The Beast of Borneo (1934)
Dir: Harry Garson
TC4P Rating: 3

None of this nonsense is in this film.

"Ve've got to haff an O-rang!" The gorilla in the poster at the right is not in this film, nor is the scantily clad woman lying prone in the picture to the gorilla's right. As for the "gorilla gland injection" mentioned at the picture's bottom, it too is not to be found in The Beast of Borneo, for the ape in residence within its frames is an actual orangutan, not a guy in a suit (for the most part; there are a couple of scenes where it is obviously so), and it is never represented as a gorilla. I suppose gorillas were generally scarier to the movie-going public in those days (it was not long after the mighty Kong came and went), but this film employs footage of real orangutans and works them into its story.

A lot of the orangutan interest early in the film, before it bogs down in its melodramatic story involving a mad Russian scientist who wants to hunt an orangutan in Borneo in order to prove his theories on an evolutionary link between humans and apes, seems to be on the orangutan's ability to make a certain noise. That noise is shown in the film to be a low, elongated growl crossed with a yell. It sounds remarkably human to my ears, and it wouldn't surprise me if the sound effect in the film was created in a studio by the human voice. In my limited experiences in zoos and watching nature videos, while orangutans are certainly cable of long, low growls, I have never heard the noise portrayed in this film come from an orangutan, and a quick search online revealed nothing that replicated it. To me, the noise reminds me of the start of the novelty rock song, The Crusher, by the Novas, from 1964. (Not sure if orangutans can do "the Hammerlock" either, but if they don't, they're a bunch of turkey-necks.)

On the brief Wikipedia entry for The Beast of Borneo, it is mentioned the film is "made up mostly of leftover footage from Universal Studio's 1931 'East of Borneo,'" but there is no source cited for this information, nor does any such connection between the two movies appear on the page for either one on IMDb. I would think that, were this true, somebody on IMDb would have included it in the trivia section on either page. At the very least, The Beast of Borneo provided me with the directions by which discovered other items within my range of interest. It provoked me to do a direct search for East of Borneo (which is a very striking movie in many ways) and finding that film online also made me run into the fascinating story of the surrealist film made about lead actress Rose Hobart by artist Joseph Cornell from a print of East of Borneo, also named Rose Hobart (1936).

Of The Beast of Borneo itself, it is very low-budget, crude, has horrid sound, and exists primarily in the public domain, with the ups (easy access) and downs (poor, unrestored prints) in viewing that entails. The acting is the stiff standard of its quality level, but it is not unentertaining. Much of the fun in the picture comes from a baby orangutan who is as adorable as hell and is very proficient in extricating himself from any knot imaginable. The film is also just over an hour long, so despite the crawling slowness of the talky scenes in building the thin plot, it flies by swiftly enough. You get some mild jungle thrills, and that is all. And if you are me, you get pleasantly reminded of The Crusher... RRRRRRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!


Hell Baby (2013)
Dir: Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant
TC4P Rating: 5

I thought this one was in the bag. Or, in the womb, as it were...

I am fond, to varying degrees, of a large number of comic actors working in the entertainment field these days. A good many of them come from The State, the MTV sketch show that was relatively short-lived, but has had a zillion other shows and movies spring from the creative minds of its talented cast over recent years. 

Two of these cast members, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, had a very successful turn in creating the Cops spoof, Reno 911!, but have had even greater success as the screenwriters of films in which I have very little interest: The Night at the Museum series, Taxi, The Pacifier, Balls of Fury, and Herbie: Fully Loaded. All of these films, while panned critically by a majority of film critics, made money, which is the most important part if you want to continue writing in films. Except for Let's Go to Prison, which was not a financial success, I have had little interest in these films (there are two on this list I have yet to see), and Let's Go to Prison mostly sucked. But Lennon and Garant were having mostly hits with very few misses as far as the bottom line was concerned.

But then came Hell Baby. Not only were Lennon and Garant co-directing the film this time (Garant directed the Reno: 911! movie, which I loved, but you have to be a Reno fan to appreciate it -- filmgoers didn't generally), but they have prominent roles as ass-kicking Vatican exorcists. Hell Baby seems to be right in my wheelhouse, and they stacked it with comic actors, as I mentioned at the beginning, for whom I hold a great fondness: Rob Corddry, Keegan-Michael Key, David Wain, Michael Ian Black, Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer, Kumail Nanjiani, and a tasty Riki Lindhome. And best of all, from the trailer I saw a couple of years ago, Hell Baby held promise of being a fun horror comedy. I thought it was a sure winner.

I'm not sure why I put off seeing the film ultimately, but it doesn't matter. Hell Baby is never as good as you hope it will be, though it is not a chore to watch. It's really just standard. The actors perform at the top of their abilities, but the story never jells. Scenes go on for far longer than they need to; I suppose they are going for the uncomfortable vibe of much comedy these days, used successfully on many Adult Swim programs that star many of these same actors (Children's Hospital, as an example), and perhaps that shortened format seems to work better for the style. Here, it just makes the film grind to a halt again and again. Lennon and Garant as a team are the best part of the movie, but that is onscreen, and even there, the priest characters (while having most of the funniest lines) get a little overplayed (yes, I get it... these priests love strippers).

And can we have a moratorium on movie characters getting run down by motor vehicles from out of nowhere for comedic effect? At least it is not a bus speeding at an insane rate of speed for a city street this time. (I really, really hate when that happens...)


Pernicious (2014)
Dir: James Cullen Bressack
TC4P Rating: 3

NOT the poster on Netflix
mentioned in the text.

Let's play pretend for a bit. Let's say that, chiefly because I get obsessed with the sound of various words, that I became uniquely driven to locate a movie with the unlikely name of Persnickety on Netflix. Instead, I undershoot in the alphabetical order a tad and end up seeing something called Pernicious instead.

OK, that's not how it happened. It was actually, "Hey, let's see what horror movies have been added to streaming. Pernicious? What a stupid title. Oh, cute girls on the cover in various states of undress posing with a creepy Asian goddess statue. Seems dumb and quick. Let's watch it." I wish that I were beyond such measures, but there you go. Just a dopey male driven by libido like the others. 

Pernicious lost me almost from the start, and at no point did it come close to winning me back. Its opening scene has the actresses speaking what is probably vapid dialogue over the opening credits, but no sound emits from their eating orifices as they travel from America to Thailand, and take a boat downriver. We only hear some cheap music played, and are left not hearing their voices until they arrive at the house in which they will be staying while they serve as teachers at a local school. Not sure what a couple of them will be teaching, as they seem mostly idiotic except for the brunette (naturally). Such cliches don't matter, as one of the girls will blankly remove some sort of amulet from a small spirit house perched outside of the abode, the trio of idiots will discover the creepy gold statue of a prepubescent girl in the attic, and then will deal with the spirit within that statue as it seeks revenge for being murdered as a little girl so many years before.

That's the plot in a nutshell. You think you are getting an "Americans abroad encountering a crazy Asian ghost's bloodlust" movie, much like in The Grudge, and you do indeed get that. But the film takes a weird turn about a third of the way in when the girls run into a trio of British ex-pats in a bar, and the turn is on the level of the way From Dusk Till Dawn shifts midway through that film, but in even less of a positive way. Even though the ghost movie that is occurring never goes away, and in fact, comes back even stronger in the second half, Pernicious briefly swerves into full-on torture porn territory, as the girls, after seemingly being "roofied" by the Brits, suddenly have the boys tied up in individual rooms and slowly and methodically torture and kill them as bloodily as they can. Eyeballs are gouged and force-fed, body parts sliced, teeth yanked... this might hold appeal for certain fans of extreme filmgoing, but for me, it was all wrong tonally when matched against what comes before it and what comes after it. It is like you fell asleep watching Pernicious on cable, woke up in the middle of another horror film, fell back asleep, and were catching the rest of Pernicious on its next showing.

The other problem is that soundtrack. Not just the lack of dialogue over the credits when all of the characters are clearly having conversation, but later in the film when two of the local residents have a full scene speaking Thai, which is pretty important to the plot, but there is not even the slightest impulse to put subtitles on the screen for the majority of the world that does not speak Thai. It is fairly easy to tell what is implied by their dialogue, especially from the actions that happen both during and immediately after, but really... it seems like lax production. 

Speaking of which, at the end of an important expository scene with a local "witch," there is a split-second of cacophonous noise that bears no relation to any other sound in the scene nor to the score of the movie. It is just sheer slopping sound editing (or film processing, take you pick), and adds to the notion that this film has an unsteady captain at the wheel.

Haunted Until Only Quite Recently: The Slight Return of “Poltergeist”

Of all the films released in theatres in 1982 during the year of my 18th birthday, the one of which I am most ashamed of not seeing at that time is the original Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg version of Poltergeist. I have made up for it in spades since then. A viewing of Poltergeist is a pretty regular affair for me, whether by throwing in a disc, catching ⅔ of it on television by accident or, as I jumped at each chance to do it, seeing it four different times on actual movie screens both large and small over the years since its release.

But the first time I saw it, the following year, I was in an entirely comfortable setting, in a room full of my (still) closest friends at my pal Tony’s parents' house, during one of our regular movie marathon festivals that actually meant something back in the time when no one really owned very many prerecorded videocassettes personally. Let me explain… in the early '80s, while each of our homes had a VCR or two, the homeownership market for prerecorded VHS (and Beta) tapes was really just for techno-geeks who wanted to pay anywhere from $50 to well over $100 for an individual tape so they could play them while showing off their nascent home video theatres and sound systems.

For a movie marathon party for regular, non-wealthy kids just out of high school to work at the time, you had to rely on two things: 1) videotapes of things you recorded off television and cable, and 2) video rental stores. You could buy used videotapes at your local video store at the time, but they usually had beat up boxes, had pictures that were possibly quite jumpy, and often had one or two spots where you weren’t sure whether the tape was going to go all wonky inside the machine. You couldn’t walk into a store at that time and just buy a fresh, brand spanking new copy of Poltergeist to take home. The store owners would not have a huge display of $19.95 copies of the latest film released onto tape by Hollywood. This would happen soon enough, but not in 1982-1983.

Pricing of videotapes was largely set by the design of the rental market. If you wanted to own a new personal copy of a film, you could purchase it, but it was going to be at the price that the store paid for a copy (if you knew an avenue through which you could get it at the wholesale cost), but more than likely, if you really wanted a copy, you were going to be paying an even greater mark-up on that cost. Thus, not a lot of people wanted to pay well over $100 for a mere videotape (though the price I remember being quoted most of the time was $99.95). But, I digress…

We were basically poor kids, only a couple of us had regular jobs, most of the gang were going to college, and so money was tight. But we each had a video store membership. You could generally only rent (depending on the store) anywhere from 1-3 videotapes at a time in those days (two was the average, it seems). So, to pull off any sort of marathon, we each needed to pitch in. We were determined to hit as many genres as possible: comedy, thriller, action, sci-fi… even porn (the XXX film at this particular video marathon would be The Erotic Adventures of Candy). And while only a couple of us were full-on ragin' horror fans, most everyone in the gang liked ghost movies, and so Poltergeist stood up for the horror genre.

I am not sure how the original Poltergeist escaped a visit from me upon its theatrical release. I do remember the television commercials, which in retrospect, were pretty damned effective, in much the same way that the film continues to be. I know that I had wanted to see it, but just didn’t. It might have something to do with the fact it was released a week apart from Spielberg’s own E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, so maybe in those pre-employment, cash-poor days (in June 1982, I was still dependent on allowance), I opted for seeing a film directed by Mr. Spielberg rather than one simply produced and written by him. [Note: I am most definitely not a member of the “Spielberg actually directed Poltergeist” cabal.]

And so, there I was in a room full of my nearest and dearest pals, in the early days of the video revolution, watching movie after movie through a long Saturday afternoon and evening (which would eventually turn into a Sunday morning tableaux showing most of our crowd passed out and barely cognizant that someone was still changing tapes on the VCR). In the middle of the showing of films was Poltergeist. And I was watching it with vested interest. And I was... levitating?

That is the only word I can possibly use to describe the feeling from that evening. I don’t know if it was because I was kneeling through much of the film with my legs underneath me (in a way I couldn’t possibly sit now with the middle-aged knee problems), but it is likely I just couldn’t feel them any longer as I sat on the floor of Tony’s parents’ living room getting sucked into an otherworldly realm. Or was it the thrill I was receiving from the early Spielbergian chutzpah, before he came to rely too much on giving the audience what they expected, and was instead doing what he thought was exhilarating or entertaining? Or maybe I still thought the supernatural might be a real thing, and got caught up in the fervor with my friends. Or maybe I was just in the mood for a good time.

Whatever it was, I remember feeling as if I was squarely pitched about three to four inches above the carpet of the living room, and with every spook popping out of a closet or every tree branch grabbing a kid’s leg or every clown with an evil leer not being under the bed when expected (or every bra-less JoBeth Williams), I seemed to move about a quarter inch upward. The only other film where I can recall being so out of body was when I fought back urination for the last 133 minutes of the 153-minute Empire of the Sun (hey, maybe it is a Spielberg thing), digging my legs farther and farther underneath my theatre seat with all my might in order to not break my movie code, never mind my bladder. [Kids, when saddled with a ridiculous set of rules that do not allow you to leave a movie theatre during the running of a film for any reason short of natural disaster, always plan what you are drinking, and when you are drinking it, while preparing to see a film of any great length. At least Lawrence of Arabia -- which I have seen in a theatre six times -- has an intermission break…]

Apart from Dominique Dunne’s murder late in 1982, which made national news, the supposed “curse” of the film was really not a part of common film lore at the time we watched the film, as most of the elements that make up the curse had not occurred yet. But the film had so much up its sleeve that was, at the time, so unthinkable and out of left field, that the added threat of a curse was unnecessary. Even though Poltergeist is one of the few films that can truly be described with the title of being a “rollercoaster thrill ride,” I don’t remember coming back down to the floor for the run of it, possibly due to the ramped up anticipation of the next jolt of excitement. A steak crawling across a kitchen counter, a little girl conversing with people inside the television, someone’s face falling off in the mirror, coffins popping up in the front yard, skeletons in the swimming pool, a house folding in on itself, a rope going through a wall and coming out from the ceiling in another room, a giant closet vagina… a one-stop shop of fun and absurdity, but done with knowledge of how to get under one’s skin with the right amount of creepiness.

It would be the first of many, many viewings of Poltergeist for me, and it has stood (along with The Changeling, The Uninvited, The Haunting, The Innocents, The Legend of Hell House... I won't name them all, but perhaps a couple of others… oh, yeah… The Others) as one of the few haunted house/haunting movies that really worked for me. And because the film, at least as I see it, took the genre perhaps to the height of what could be done with such material at a summer movie, blockbuster level, I never considered the notion that someone would have the cojones to remake it over thirty years later. Well, having balls made out of brass doesn’t mean you aren’t a stupid idiot… it just means you have brass balls.