Film #149: POLTERGEIST

The summer of 1982 was virtually dominated by the spectre of Steven Spielberg, first with his mammothly successful E.T. The Extraterrestrial, and then with Poltergeist, a now-classic, sometimes sappy, sometimes genuinely frightening horror film, officially directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but with identifiably Spielbergian touches (he produced and co-wrote the film). The film ends up being sort of comparable to a Beatles song where you can pretty clearly tell which part was written by Lennon and which by McCartney. It's a oil-and-water solution, Hopper and Spielberg, and it doesn't always work, but when it does, it's super-charged (in a way, it feels like their take on William Friedkin's The Exorcist). Unfortunately, the baggage of a few really bad sequels (stay away from them) and a weird behind-the-scenes backstory have often obscured how really entertaining this 30-year-old movie is on its own.


At 2:37 a.m., little Carol-Ann (Heather O'Rourke) is lured into a darkened room where, against the static-filled, blue-blinking light of the TV screen, she begins to perceive voices talking to her from "the other side." Concerned parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams discover Carol-Ann touching the TV screen and famously warning: "They're heeeeere..." And so begins a spiral into terror that finds an average suburban California family getting slimed upon by some pretty pissed-off ghosts. No one is off-limits...even, as we soon find, the poor kids (Oliver Robins and Dominique Dunne are Carol-Ann's older siblings). At first, there's just some chairs moving about and the like. But when the cute li'l tykes end up getting swallowed up by their strangely-overlit closet and almost choked to death by a stuffed clown, well, something has to be done.


So when things escalate, the parents call in some experts: Network Oscar-winner Beatrice Straight as a doctor of parapsychology ambles by with her posse to record the events, and the diminutive Zelda Rubenstein, in a unique performance, blows in as a kindly super-medium set up to communicate with the ghosts. Rubenstein, with her honey-flavored southern accent and darkened glasses, is really the heart of the movie. She's was a fascinating character actress who still pops up occasionally, mostly on TV (however, she was part of the huge cast in Richard Kelly's bizarre Southland Tales, her final big-screen role before she passed away early in 2010). At four feet or so, Rubenstein was technically a "little person," having played a Munchkin in 1981's god-awful Under The Rainbow (with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, about the wild goings-on with all the little people hired to be in The Wizard of Oz). At any rate, Poltergeist is largely stolen by her.

The special effects here, by Richard Edlund, Bruce Nicholson, and Michael Wood, are quite a draw, too. I'll never forget the red gaping mouth that the kids' closet morphs into, nor that hallucinatory, lengthening hallway that JoBeth Williams darts down, nor the white billowy demons of the undead and the epic implosion that climaxes the movie. And the makeup, by Dorothy Pearl, really highlights perhaps the films most terrifying scenes as the dead begin to pop up out of the ground (the gloppy sequences in the neighbor's muddy swimming pool will have you grimacing--by the way, those are REAL skeletons there, which definitely seems like a Tobe Hooper touch). Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is a maybe a quieter scene that explodes into fright: a photographer on Straight's team decides to retire to the bathroom and sees something NO ONE should see in the mirror.

Let's not forget Jerry Goldsmith's score, which sometimes thickly ladles on the sweetness with a memorable theme, but is always more effective in the film's scarier portions. And, finally, it should be mentioned, I guess, that there's supposedly a curse on the Poltergeist family of actors, with a few of the principles in this and the sequels dying premature deaths. But most of the cast is alive--geez, Rubenstein, Nelson, Williams, Robins, Spielberg and Hooper are with us, and even Nelson's screeching, unscrupulous boss James Karen keeps on appearing in things like Mulholland Dr. and The Pursuit of Happyness . So why believe in some silly old curse? Unless, of course, it makes Poltergeist more fun for you somehow. That I understand.

Film #121: Smokey and the Bandit

I can still vividly remember, as a 10-year-old Atlanta kid, first seeing Smokey and the Bandit. My parents had taken me to the Northeast Expressway Drive-In Theater on opening night (if you look at the top right hand corner of this blog, you can see a torn ticket from the theater). The film's star, Burt Reynolds, was then the number one box office attraction in the country, and nowhere was this more evident than in the South. Even though he was born in Michigan but raised in Florida, Burt was pretty much adopted as a hometown boy after his breakout performance in 1972's Georgia-filmed Deliverance, he was pretty much. He returned to the state to shoot White Lightning (1973), Gator (1976) and, in 1977, Smokey and the Bandit. So seeing the latter open at an Atlanta drive-in was a big event.

My father wheeled his much-adored red-and-white '57 Chevy onto the drive-in lot way before dusk, and we sat and waited for the light to change so we could see this film we'd been hearing about for so long. The action-comedy had been in production all throughout 1976, filmed primarily in neighboring Jonesboro and McDonough, with major scenes filmed at the Atlanta's Lakewood Fairgrounds, where a gigantic racetrack and rollercoaster were situated. It was unbelievably exciting for my ten-year-old self to be at the Northeast Expressway Drive-In Theater on opening night; only Burt's very presence could have made it more so.

When darkness fell, we settled in with our snacks and waited for the joy. And so it began, and the film was just gearing up when disaster struck. The frames fluttered and then cooked brightly on the screen, and we knew what this meant: the print had been damaged. The screen lights flashed on in surprise, and I remember instantly looking out the back window and seeing the second screen at the drive-in (this was the first multi-screened drive-in in Atlanta). Smokey was going to be such a Georgia hit that the managers had booked it on the other screen as well, and there, the film was still playing fine. Now, horns on our side were honking in protest as we all waited impatiently for the situation to be fixed. When the projector powered up again, we got a shock: we weren't gonna be seeing Smokey and the Bandit; instead, the second feature, Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive flickered forth.

Now, I don't know if you've ever seen Eaten Alive, but no matter how much love gorehounds may have for it, it ain't no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it CERTAINLY ain't no Smokey and the Bandit. It's a nasty, scuzzy, unfrightening, totally mean-spirited piece of crap that has Neville Brand as a hotel owner who chops the heads off his guests with his scythe and feeds the corpses to his pet alligator. My mother, an avid animal lover (as we all were) was particularly scarred by the filmed feeding of a guest's pooch to the 'gator (to this day, my mother won't watch scary movies where a dog or a cat appears, because she's sure they're going to be killed off, and she's almost always right; it's a trend that's thankfully almost died off). Anyway, needless to say, we were mightilly pissed. But we stayed steadfast for Smokey, because Burt was our man. Happily, we weren't disappointed.

In it, Reynolds plays Bo "Bandit" Darville, a fast-talking, fast-moving rig driver who makes a massive wager with a bizarre, cocky pair of Texas businessmen (Big Enos and Little Enos, played by Pat McCormick and Paul Williams). They challenge the Bandit to deliver of truckload of Coors beer from Texarkana, TX to Atlanta, GA--a little under 1500 miles--in 28 hours (which was a little more difficult back when the speed limit was only 55 MPH). At any rate, Bandit has no problem with this. He hops into his black Trans Am (you know--the one with the T-top and the firey eagle on the hood) and gits, enlisting the help of Cletus ("When You're Hot, You're Hot" country singer Jerry Reed), who's to drive the actual payload while the Bandit's Trans Am serves as a decoy for the po-lice.

Only problem is, Reynolds takes the time to pick up Sally Field, who's decked out in a wedding dress and is thumbing a ride on the highway, escaping her marriage to a doofus played by former football star Mike Henry (who'd played alongside Reynolds in The Longest Yard). Henry's father happens to be a foul-mouthed, over-zealous country sheriff named Buford T. Justice (a dynamic, career-reviving, Southern-fried turn for certified New Yorker Jackie Gleason), who makes it his mission to catch the Bandit and foil his delivery of that Coors beer. So then we get nearly an hour of terrific car chase stunt-work from director Hal Needham, a former stuntman himself. Drive-in audiences (and four-wall audiences, too) wouldn't see so many cars pulverized for another three years, when John Landis' The Blues Brothers hit the screen. Next to that and H.B. Halicki's Gone in 60 Seconds, there has never been more wholesale destruction of Detroit product ever recorded on film. This makes Smokey and the Bandit one of the greatest drive-in movies ever (not one of the film's scenes takes place at night, which made it great for drive-ins, as it was hard to see, under the stars, scenes filmed in darkness).

Scripted by James Lee Barrett (The Greatest Story Ever Told) and Charles Shyer (Private Benjamin), the film was tight, funny, and fast. It may seem stupid today--and it is, really. But I defy you to admit you're not entertained at least a bit by it upon first viewing. Reynolds and Fields are a searing-hot couple (they'd go on to a real-life relationship that lasted for four years; together, they'd go on to appear in Smokey 2, Hooper, and the excellent Reynolds- directed comedy The End); Gleason, with his cornpone Southern accent, is ridiculously funny as the bumbling sheriff (I love it, against my better judgment, when he lets loose with the undying catchphrase "I'm gonna barbecue your ass," but my truly favorite scene--one that still makes me giggle like a kid--occurs when Justice walks out of a restaurant with a long stream of toilet paper improbably hooked onto his treasured smokey's hat). Henry also gets laughs as his idiot-boy son, always there making sure his dad's hat is secure (even after the top's been lopped off of their patrol car). Once cast as a villain in Gator, another Reynolds vehicle, Reed is quite charming (his "boogety, boogety, boogety" has become a rallying cry at present-day NASCAR events, and his songs "Eastbound and Down" and "They Call Him The Bandit" have become country classics). And my mom even got to instantly get over her distaste at the death of that dog in Eaten Alive, because Smokey starred a yelping basset hound named Fred as Reed's sidekick.

According to Box Office Mojo's ALL TIME BOX OFFICE CHAMPS adjusted for inflation list, Smokey and the Bandit ended up making more than $408 million, and became the centerpiece for the CB craze of the 1970s. Two sequels followed--the second was just okay, and the third was one of the most hilariously bad movies ever made); it also spawned countless rip-offs. My mom and dad liked it so much they ended up shelling out for a black Trans Am in 1978; now, THAT was bitchin' (though it broke down so much my parents swore never to buy another American-made car again). So, even now, after seeing all the Bergmans, Antonionis, Kubricks and Kurosawas the world has to offer, my fondness for Smokey and the Bandit remains as indelible as my love for fried chicken, cicadas, dogwood trees, and drive-ins.