Poltergeist

Oh dear. The words “25th Anniversary Edition” suggest so much more than remastered audio and two limp featurette documentaries.

On the plus side, the picture is looking good. There is some grain but this is a good transfer in crisp 2.40:1 widescreen. The sound, too, has benefited from its remastering, with the thumps and screams suitably satisfying. The film and both the extras are also fully subtitled.

The features, however, are nothing short of woeful. Both are talking heads-driven documentaries about paranormal phenomenon, split for no good reason into two halves – They Are Here: The Real World Of Poltergeists Revealed and Science Of The Spirtis And Communing With The Dead. These features see a succession of mediums, ghost hunters and authors talk about the concept of poltergeists and hauntings over clips from the film – but anyone over the age of 18 will have heard it all before. There is only one mention of the actual production of the movie itself – the producer says they wanted to draw on ‘facts’ – but this is a pale imitation of what this sort of edition should be. Admittedly, the widely referred to ‘curse’ of poltergeist means that some of the main players are unfortunately no longer with us, but plenty still are – Tobe Hooper, Steven Spielberg, Craig T Nelson, JoBeth Williams et al – and are conspicuous by their absence.

While this spruced up version of the film is certainly worth having the package is little more than a ghost of what might have been.