American Poltergeist is about five young people that rent out three rooms in a large house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Taryn (Addy Green) senses something wrong with the house almost right away, but the rest of her friends don't believe anything that she's saying. They carry on plans to throw a birthday party in the house. Unfortunately for all of them, that night also happens to be the most dangerous night of the year to be in that house. Taryn and her friends discover a strange link to the secret history of the property, and are soon fighting for their lives.
Let's just get this out of the way: this is a very bad movie. This is evident from even the earliest scenes of the film. The friends arrive at the house and are greeted by the owner, Dianna (Donna Spangler). Spangler delivers her lines in a monotone presumably meant to be creepy, but mostly comes off as the product of too much botox and pills. The characters take a tour of the house, and are confronted with various mild oddities. Things move around sometimes. A figure pops up in the background. A door closes and locks on its own. That kind of stuff.
At no point does this movie present anything that's actually scary. It keeps moving on with tepid weirdness, best represented by Spangler's blank expression. Eventually, the film reveals the bloody history of the house, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No one reacts rationally to any of these threats. A Christian character is called upon to perform an exorcism at one point, because apparently all Christians know how to do that. There is a scene where somebody says out loud, "this isn't the time to argue about family ancestry," because that is something that these characters do in the middle of danger.
At any point in this story, the character could have just walked away. If not all of them, at least Taryn might have been smart enough to get away from the danger. But she is stymied by the cars suddenly not running. She fears the house and what's going on inside, but apparently not enough to just walk away. The house appears to be in the suburbs, smack dab in the middle of civilization. But it appears of the heroine of the film is so opposed to walking that she gives up thoughts of escaping sans a vehicle.
Even for a low budget movie, the production values are pretty shoddy. The methods used to try and hide the lack of resources are pretty transparent. Almost every encounter with the supernatural in this movie happens offscreen, the scene cutting out before anything interesting can happen. Donna Spangler may be the worst member of this cast, but her level of acting is pretty much indicative of the larger whole. The younger actors are not nearly talented enough to make any of these terrible lines bearable.
American Poltergeist almost feels like it's meant to be a joke. It is so bad in a couple of its sequences that it's hard to imagine that anyone was taking it seriously. But the film as a whole is bizarrely sober. In spite of a series of camp elements, this movie is trying very to be a straightforward horror movie. And this is its downfall, because the resources and the talent just isn't there to make any of this feasible. This is another terrible movie that doesn't deserve to take up any of our cinemas. We can do so much better than this.
My Rating:
