Bonus video review: "Dead Snow"

Here's everything you need to know about this Norwegian horror comedy: It has zombie Nazis.

ZOMBIE NAZIS!! I mean, doesn't that say it all? I think after hearing this information, pretty much everyone can decide whether they want to chow down on this goofy helping of splatter fun, or avoid it like the plague.

Count me among the enthusiasts.

Directed and co-written by Tommy Wirkola, "Dead Snow" is a gleeful send-up of the zombie genre, while delightfully reveling in the blood-and-gore celebration.

The characters -- a bunch of medical students taking an Easter holiday at a remote cabin in the snow-choked mountains -- will often break into English to quote American movies or talk about them. One chubby fellow, who's a professed film nerd, even wonders if they aren't acting out the plot of a cheap horror flick with their ill-advised trip to the middle of nowhere.

When the group discovers a cache of gold hidden in the cabin, this same character intones: "Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory."

(That's from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," for those slow on the uptake.)

Unfortunately for our friends, the treasure was stolen by the Nazis from the local populace, who eventually rebelled, driving the greedy soldiers into the mountains to die. But their withered corpses -- still dressed in suspiciously fresh-looking World War II uniforms -- remain hungry for the treasure, and human flesh.

For a low-budget horror movie, the bloody special effects are pretty impressive. One person's head is ripped apart by several zombies, leaving his brain to splatter on the ground in front of his friends.

There's a lot of entrails -- they even play a role in the plot. One guy gets disemboweled and keeps on running, but his progress is halted when his intestines snag on a tree branch.

Another fellow makes like Ash from "Evil Dead 2" with a chainsaw.

"Dead Snow" manages to be both funny and horrifying. For people (like me) who love generous helpings of cinematic gore, this flick is a banquet.

DVD extras are pretty generous, and run longer than the movie's 91 minutes.

There's a detailed making-of documentary, and featurettes on the make-up and special effects processes, outtakes and sound production.

There are also a pair of lengthy video segments that chronicle the production ("Madness in the North!") and the film's marketing in the U.S. ("Madness in the West!"). Amateurish but often hilarious, these videologs capture the cast and crew in amazingly frank commentaries.

For example, Wirkola says that in casting his film, he simply chose the actors who would work the cheapest. The actors themselves jokingly (?) berate the film company as a bunch of cheapskates and amateurs.

Especially humorous is the cast's trip to the Sundance festival, where "Dead Snow" was a huge hit. One actor -- sporting a massive cold sore on his lip the whole time -- crashes a fellow cast member's bath, and comments that the rich American food is causing them all to poop several times a day.

What a load ... of fun.

Movie: 3 stars
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "The Wolfman"

There hasn't been a big-budget Hollywood werewolf movie in a long time, and based on this new venture there may not be again: "The Wolfman" is howlingly bad.

This film from director Joe Johnston and screenwriters David Self and Andrew Kevin Walker is a remake of the 1941 film "The Wolf Man" starring Claude Rains as a man suffering from lycanthropy, a movie that helped set off the monster movie craze.

The new version stars Benicio del Toro -- not that you could ever discern this fact from the movie's trailers -- in a glum, flat performance. Del Toro's no hack, so I can only guess he was trying to gauge his performance on some earlier interpretations, notably Lon Chaney, who portrayed the werewolf in the 1941 film.

If this new movie sounds familiar, that's because it was originally supposed to be released in November of 2008. It was repeatedly pushed back, and some new scenes were shot last year and computerized effects added in.

The result is a strange mix. The action scenes with the werewolf are exciting enough, although most of the kills seem to be of the "boo-gotcha" variety. Johnston starts out shooting the monster circumspectly, but about halfway through he switches to full-on gore mode. There's lots of torn limbs, spilled entrails, and ripping of flesh in long, stringy tendrils.

Then we switch the the "human" scenes, which are interminably boring.

Emily Blunt plays Gwen, the fiance of a son of Lord Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) killed by some beast. Del Toro plays the other son, Lawrence, a famous stage actor who returns to investigate his brother's murder -- and cast some goo-goo eyes at Gwen.

Lord Talbot is a strange figure who talks about how much he loves his sons, but behaves curiously indifferent to them -- especially whether they live or die.

The transformation scenes are impressive, but honestly aren't better than the ones achieved by "An American Werewolf in London" nearly 30 years ago.

Hugo Weaving is a welcome respite as Abberline, the Scotland Yard detective sent to investigate the murders. He has a great scene where wanders into the local pub and begins to read a newspaper. The frightened townsfolk demand to know why he isn't out hunting the creature. Abberline responds that since it's impossible for him to track the beast, it's better if he remains close to the largest concentration of "potential victims" -- i.e., the pub-dwellers swilling their pints.

The movie keeps tumbling along through alternating scenes of increasing violence and dialogue scenes of surmounting lethargy.

I have never fallen asleep in a movie, but I came dangerously close during "The Wolfman."

1 star

Reeling Backward: "Village of the Damned"

So here's my rule on film remakes: Unless you've got a really original new take on the material, or technology has advanced significantly enough to do amazing things they couldn't do in the first movie, best to leave it alone.

If your goal is something like, "I want to bring this amazing story to today's audiences, who were too young to see the first film" -- well, then spring for some NetFlix accounts so people can watch the original.

Case in point: John Carpenter's 1995 remake of the 1960 horror cult classic, "Village of the Damned." You know the one -- creepy blonde-haired kids with psychic powers wreak havoc upon the townsfolk. It's basically one big kiddie fantasy, where they get to boss around the grown-ups, and do away with them messily if they try to stand up for themselves.

Other than adding color and a few low-rent special effects that aren't that much of a leap over what they could do 35 years earlier, Carpenter's "Village" doesn't do anything the first film didn't. If it had come out first, it would be remembered as a cheesy classic. Instead, it's just cheese.

When the opening credits first came on, I have to confess I looked at the cast and snickered to myself, "What a gang of has-beens!" The film stars Christopher Reeve (in his last movie role before his tragic paralysis), Kirstie Alley (already plumping up and forced to hide behind a lot of long coats and black turtlenecks), Mark Hamill, Linda Kozlowski (Mrs. Crocodile Dundee) and Michael Paré (who mercifully dies a few minutes in).

It's like a parade of aging stars whose careers have petered out, desperately begging the audience, "Hey, remember me from the '80s?!?"

Anyway, the plot is pretty much the same as the original film. A strange phenomenon descends on the tiny town of Midwich, causing everyone to faint for six hours. Anyone who crosses over the town border falls under the same spell. There's only a few casualties -- including a guy working the barbecue grill at a school picnic, who toasts himself to a nice charred brown. But a bunch of women turn up pregnant, all giving birth on the same night.

Alley plays a mysterious government scientist who's charged with watching over the development of the children, and Reeve is the town doctor and the father of the leader of the killer albinos, who murders his wife while still an infant.

Kozlowski plays the school principal and the mother of the one strange child who seems to feel compassion for others.

There are some creepy moods as the nine white-haired ones traipse around in perfect unison, with each girl paired with a boy. Except for Kozlowski's son, David, whose mate was stillborn and kept in a tube by Alley.

Of course, it's not too much of a leap to say that the children are actually aliens implanted into a group of human mothers, with the goal of reproducing and taking over the world. They can read minds and twist people to their collective will, with their eyes glowing whenever they exert their influence.

I guess it's scary the first time the killer kids force some grown-up to off themselves, but after the fifth or sixth time someone goes into a trance and proceeds to drive his truck into a gas tank or point his gun barrel at his own chin, it gets to be downright boring.

"Village of the Damned" is not a terrible movie, but it just doesn't have any purpose for being. If I had psychic powers, I'd have used them to convince John Carpenter not to do this remake.

2 stars

Reeling Backward: "Prince of Darkness"

It's Week 3 of my John Carpenter retrospective, and I'm very happy to say that "Prince of Darkness" was a huge leap for the better over "They Live." Last up for next week is his remake of "Village of the Damned."

(Incidentally, all four films are collected in a new DVD, "John Carpenter: Master of Fear" that's now out. Zero extras, but for a suggested retail of a mere $16, it's a great buy.)

As you might guess from the title, "Prince" is about the end of the world and the return of Satan to rule over the Earth. It's a quite entertaining bit of sci-fi/horror apocalyptic claptrap, with Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong leading a group of scientists trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together before Old Scratch takes over.

Deep in the bowels of an old church, a mysterious canister is filled with swirling green goo. It was only discovered after an old priest died clutching the key to the chamber. Pleasance, a mainstay of Carpenter's movies, plays an unnamed priest who attempts to pierce the mystery. He enlists the aid of Professor Birack (Wong), a brilliant if esoteric scientist whose work straddles the line between physics and metaphysics.

Birack brings along a small army of students to camp out at the church and study the canister, where they are slowly converted one by one into Satan's zombies. The evil spell is passed by vomiting the green goo from a zombie's mouth into a human's. It's unclear if they're actually dead, although two reanimate after they died as humans -- one memorably so by slitting his own throat with a piece of broken banister.

For grad students, they're a suspiciously old-looking bunch. Jameson Parker, best remembered as the blonde guy from TV's "Simon & Simon," was 40 when this movie came out in 1987. I guess this bunch took a rather laissez-faire approach to their studies. At the rate they're going, they'll be collecting Social Security by the time they make the adjunct faculty list.

Pleasance always seems to have at least one great speech in every movie he's in, and he delivers a whopper here. After being confronted with a 2,000-year-old book that states that Jesus and Satan were extra-terrestrials and the dark one was merely banished, not defeated, the old priest does not engage in a delusional defense of his faith. Rather, he sagely takes thousands of years of religious doctrine, including his own life's calling, and pitches it in the ditch:

"Apparently a decision was made to characterize pure evil as a spiritual force -- evil within the darkness of the hearts of men. That was more convenient. And that way Man remained at the center of things -- a stupid lie. We were salesmen, that's all. We sold our product to those who didn't have it: A new life, reward ourselves, punish our enemies. So we can live without truth, substance, malevolence. That was the truth: Asleep, until now."

One of the female scientists is branded as the chosen one to be the receptacle of Satan's will. She's transformed into a gooey creature covered with sores. At first her belly swells, and we think it's going to be a nasty demon-birth thing, but then it subsides and she rises, bent on finding a mirror so she can reach through the portal to bring the horned one through to this plane of existence.

The image of her gnarly, bloody fingers peeking through the reverse side of the mirror pane is quite striking. Another very brief but haunting image is that of a pigeon that has been caught and crucified on a tiny cross.

In one great scene, one of their colleagues who has been killed speaks to the survivors in a strange quavering voice. He opens his coat to reveal a chest of beetles, and indeed his entire body has been eaten away from the inside out by a plague of insects. Just before he collapses into a heap of empty clothes, he tells them, "Pray for death." Cool stuff.

"Prince of Darkness" was not well reviewed when it came out, but it's grown in stature during the ensuing years. It's notable for the presence of rocker Alice Cooper as the leader of the zombie horde gathering outside the church. When a computer dweeb tries to escape, Cooper takes half an old bicycle frame and runs him through with it. Cooper even appears on the cover of the DVD reissue, despite not having any lines and a total screen time of perhaps three minutes.

If the film has a weakness, it's the romance between Parker's character and a colleague played by Lisa Blount. Their relationships is given very short shrift by the screenplay -- they have one conversation and soon after they're in bed -- so it doesn't carry much weight when Blount's character sacrifices herself at the end to save him (and the rest of the world).

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "They Live"

I'm continuing my journey through the John Carpenter oeuvre with some films I hadn't seen before, starting with 1988's "They Live."

It's kind of a cheesy flick with low-rent special effects. It stars Roddy "Rowdy" Piper, which probably tells you more about the quality of the filmmaking than anything I could say. That same year, the wrestling star made his masterpiece, "Hell Comes to Frogtown." This movie isn't quite as schlocky ... but man, it ain't good.

That said, the story does have some interesting themes that are worth commenting on, about a race of hidden aliens who are subtly taking over the world.

Piper plays Nada, a wandering average Joe who arrives in Los Angeles looking for work. He lands a construction job and befriends Frank (Keith David again), who introduces him to a shantytown where he can live and eat.

Nada stumbles across strange activity at the church across the street, which is apparently the headquarters of a secret underground of humans fighting the aliens by broadcasting television signals with cryptic warnings. After the police brutally break up the place, Nada discovers a box full of sunglasses that allow one to see the world as it really is.

With the glasses on, the world turns a fuzzy black-and-white, and billboards and magazines are revealed to actually be Orwellian commands like "Obey," "Consume," "No independent thought" and "Marry and reproduce."

Even more alarmingly, a certain percentage of the human population are actually aliens with skull-like faces and spotted skin. Nada arms himself with an arsenal of guns and starts wiping out the aliens.

A few notable scenes: At one point Nada hides from the police in a bank. Wielding a shotgun, he announces to the stunned inhabits: "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!" This, of course, has since became a very famous tough-guy line. Although Piper actually delivers it in a strangely stiff and robotic way.

And then there's the fight scene between Nada and Frank, which just goes on, and on, and on. And on. At one point you think they're done fighting, and the start it all up again. It gets to be a pretty nasty affair, with eye-gouging, hand-biting and crotch-pummeling. It's obviously in the movie to give Piper a chance to show off his 'rasslin' skills. The stated reason for the fight is that Nada wants Frank to try on the sunglasses, and he refuses. I don't know about you, but if somebody insisted that I try on some glasses, I might not like it, but it's not worth trading punches over. Of course, as soon as the fisticuffs are over, they're the best of chums again.

The title comes from a bit of graffiti scene in the movie, "They live, we sleep" -- which pretty much sums up the subtext of the whole movie. There's a distinctly anti-capitalistic streak in the movie, with a lot of talk about people fighting with each other over money and consumer items. A number of the humans have knowingly signed up to help the aliens, with riches as their reward. The basic theme is that American culture has devolved into a land of sheep lulled into a trance by television and advertising.

As heavy-handed as this stuff is, it's actually the most entertaining thing about "They Live."

1.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "The Thing" (1982)

It would be fair to say that John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the sci-fi/horror classic "The Thing from Another World" was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. Shortened to simply, "The Thing," Carpenter's film was a study in moody atmospherics and eye-popping gross-out special effects.

Unlike the 1951 original, there are no female characters, just a motley bunch manning an Antarctic science station. There's not even much characterization, other than a few broad strokes for each guy: There's Windows, the nervous one, and Doc Copper, and Blair the scientist, and Clark, who likes dogs, and so on. And yet each man is distinct and easily recognizable from one another. It sort of reminds me of the space Marines from "Aliens," where within 20 minutes you knew every soldier's name and identity.

The protagonist is MacReady, the helicopter pilot played by Kurt Russell. He's moody, and a loner, and a heavy drinker. But like a lot of Russell's action characters, he has that uncanny ability to stay icily calm in a crisis. So naturally the other men look to him for leadership, even though Garry is ostensibly in charge.

MacReady's main foil is Childs (Keith David), who's a hothead and the most logical choice to challenge MacReady's status as alpha dog.

Speaking of dogs, the movie begins with the image of a beautiful husky being chased across the snows by a helicopter, with a man aboard firing a hunting rifle at it. This launches us into the plot of the station being attacked by a creature from outer space. It had crash-landed here eons ago, was found and thawed out by some Norwegians who fell victim to it.

The creature is very different from the one in the original movie, which was some kind of plant-based blood-sucking vampire thing. Here the creature is more like a virus that attacks living things, assimilating them and copying them perfectly. In effect it is a changeling, although it absorbs whatever it copies, rather than destroying the body.

The special effects, which were simply amazing back in 1982, still hold up very well nearly 30 years later. The scenes I remember most are when the doctor is trying to shock one of the team members back to life, and the defibrillator pads crash right through his chest, revealing him as infected. Then sharp teeth from either side of the chest cavity snap down on the doctor's arms, severing them.

MacReady burns the body with a flamethrower, but the creature's head -- still wearing the outer guise of a the red-headed guy it had infected -- separates itself from the flaming corpse, crawling onto the floor and sprouting spider-like legs and eye stalks.

I still get a thrill watching this stuff. "The Thing" has lost none of its bite.

4 stars

Catching up with "Paranormal Activity"

Things are finally slowing down a little bit for me, so I was able to sneak away this morning to catch "Paranormal Activity," the little low-budget horror film that's been making such a huge splash.

It's hard being a horror fan married to someone who absolutely will not watch any movies that are even slightly scary. Even the PG-rated "Poltergeist" tested her limits. I have to sneak off to satisfy my jones for gore.

"Paranormal" was shot (supposedly) for a mere $15,000 in just a week, and is obviously inspired by "The Blair Witch Project," which followed a similar trajectory of stealth indie to mega-hit a decade ago. It takes the form of a documentary edited from found video footage, shot by actors (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) using their real names.

Writer/director Oren Peli takes this conceit to the most extreme, eschewing opening and closing credits for brief announcements. Say this for Peli -- it takes balls to leave your own name off your movie.

I guess I'm just too old or have seen too many horror movies or am just too much of a grump to really enjoy "Paranormal Activity." I've seen all the tricks, and it's very, very hard to make me genuinely scared of a movie.

It doesn't help that the film drags in certain sections, to the point that I was shifting in my seat and checking my watch. It's basically a lot of footage of the couple sleeping in their home as ghostly whispers and thumping noises are heard from time to time.

Of course, they behave in the typical manner of all horror-film characters: Gobsmacking stupidity. Despite the increasing amount of danger presented, they never leave the house where all these threats are emanating. Writing it off by having a psychic show up to say, "Leaving won't help. It'll just follow you" feels like a cop-out.

I don't know about you, but if demonic forces were knocking stuff around my house and leaving footprints next to my bed, I'd hop in my car and see how well he can haunt my ass at 75 mph.

The genesis of this movie is interesting. Peli -- who has no formal training as a filmmaker -- came up with the idea and shot it on a shoestring (his old house served as the set) using non-actors. It was shown at some festivals in 2007, but basically languished, looking for a distributor. A copy made its way to Steven Spielberg's hands, which opened some doors. The original plan was to reshoot a new version, but that plan was scrapped after Peli's original film was shown to some test audiences.

The ending is new, however, and I'm not a particular fan of it. It feels like a compromise to commerciality.

If I were grading "Paranormal Activity" as something I'd seen as a student film or at a small horror film fest, I'd probably give it the benefit of the doubt. But it's now being hyped as the next "Blair Witch" or 'one of the scariest movies of all time,' which oversells it dramatically.

I watched "Blair Witch Project." I knew "Blair Witch Project." "Blair Witch Project" was a friend of mine. "Paranormal Activity," you're no "Blair Witch Project."

2 stars

Reeling Backward: "Pit and the Pendulum"

Roger Corman and Vincent Price had long careers doing low-budget horror flicks, often together. "Pit and the Pendulum" was one of their first big hits together, and the 1961 film remains an atmospheric and engaging milestone in their work nearly a half-century later.

The film is of course based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe, whose dreary and dark-themed work in many ways was a progenitors of the modern horror movie. The story is set in the 1500s, after the Spanish Inquisition, when torture and mayhem were considered a religious duty of the holy men wielding horrible instruments of pain.

Price plays Sebastian Medina, the lord of a dank castle on the shores of the ocean that once belonged to his father, one of the chief Inquisitors. As the story opens his wife Elizabeth (Barbara Steele) has recently died under mysterious circumstances, and her brother Francis (John Kerr) has come to investigate her demise.

He finds Don Medina to be in a state of shock and grief, and the tang of guilt hangs on him, flavoring all of his skittish behavior -- which only causes Francis to suspect foul play.

The other players are Launa Anders as Catherine, Sebastian's sister, and Antony Carbone as Doctor Leon, the family physician and Sebastian's best friend.

The film unspools more or less as a murder mystery, with various parties coming under suspicion at different times. For awhile it seems that the servants are echoing Elizabeth's voice, and playing the harpsichord in the dead of night, and other teasing reminders of the deceased lady of the house. Sebastian himself is suggested to be insanely recreating his wife's activity himself, especially after Francis discovers a secret passage between his bedroom and Elizabeth's.

Director Corman's films were notorious for their tiny budgets, but "Pit" has a pretty decent look to it, with some nicely creepy dungeons and detailed costumes. The matte paintings of the castle against a crashing ocean is kind of hokey to eyes in 2009, but likely looked convincing in 1961.

The acting, however, wavers widely in quality. Kerr seems to have exactly two expressions, and they each grow tiring rather quickly.

Price was known for his wild expressions, which bordered on the comedic, which contributed to the schlocky nature of many of his films. He appears to be playing it straight in "Pit and the Pendulum," and the movie contains not a trace of a smirk.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "I Walked with a Zombie"

All of the attention to zombies lately -- "Zombieland" being the most obvious example -- got me to thinking about the cinematic roots of the walking undead.

I remember in some review or article in the past year or so, I referenced George A. Romero's 1968 "Night of the Living Dead," and wrote that Romero more or less created the zombie flick. Some fans of old-school zombie flicks from the 1940s, and even earlier, wrote in to set me straight.

I still stand by my description of Romero as the granddaddy of zombie movie makers, since he was the first to portray mass hordes of them feasting upon the living, and threatening to take over the world. Prior incarnations tended to only feature one or two zombies, and they certainly didn't stumble around with a craving for human brains.

"I Walked with a Zombie" from 1943 is a perfect example. There are exactly two zombies in the movie: A beautiful white woman and an African man. The man is super-skinny and has memorably bugged-out eyes, but the woman doesn't look any different from you or me -- other than the fact that she doesn't talk, or even seem to think.

The backdrop of the story is voodoo, as is often the case with these early zombie flicks. A young nurse named Betsy (Frances Dee) is employed to care for a plantation owner's catatonic wife in the West Indies. On the ship journey from Canada, she meets the owner himself -- a tall, handsome gentleman with a dark mood. Paul Holland (Tom Conway) advises Betsy not to fall in love with the rustic beauty of the islands: "Everything good dies here -- even the stars," he says.

The movie, directed by Jacques Tourneur, is viewed now mostly for its campiness, which cheesy dialogue like that which I just quoted does little to dispel. Another howler is when the cheeky younger brother Wesley (James Ellison) describes his big bro as "quite the Byronic character" -- doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? And I laughed out loud when Betsy tells one of the maids, "You have to turn away from a horse to lead him," and the servant responds that men are very much the same.

Still, the film is not as schlocky as you might expect. Tourneur shows a great eye for composition, and uses the black-and-white contrasts to great effect. The cinematography was by J. Roy Hunt, who had quite a prolific B-movie career, including the original "Mighty Joe Young."

The story is a fairly preposterous love triangle. Betsy learns that Paul's wife, Jessica, became catatonic after a huge confrontation in which Wesley, who had fallen in love with her, planned to run away with her. Jessica came down with a fever, and never truly awoke. Edith Barrett also pops up as Wesley and Paul's mother, who is a physician practicing to help the indigenous island people, and has more insight into the voodoo ways than she lets on.

Betsy and Paul soon fall in love, but Betsy cannot bring herself to break up a marriage -- even one between a man and a woman sleepwalking through life. She secretly takes Jessica to the voodoo ritual, where the natives are suspicious of the woman. A sword dancer pierces her arm with his weapon, and they are shocked when she does not bleed. It turns out Jessica has been turned into a zombie.

Things get a little confusing here. Despite abhorring Jessica's state, the voodoo folks apparently have their own zombie, Carrefour (Darby Jones), whom they send to the plantation to abscond with Jessica. For what reason, I can't imagine -- do they want to have zombie mate for Carrefour? In any case, things end tragically.

"I Walked with a Zombie" is barely more than an hour in length, and despite its camp-worthy dialogue and hammy acting, I actually enjoyed it as an early progenitor of the modern zombie flick.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "Poltergeist"

For my money, "Poltergeist" is one of the scariest movies of the '80s, and certainly one of the most frightening PG-rated films of all time.

How in the world did this 1982 flick get a PG rating? My understanding is that it originally received an R from the MPAA, but it was changed to a PG during the appeals process, which usually involves editing out some of the more objectionable material. So how did the scene where the guy tears off his own face pass muster?

Whatever. I'm glad it did. Otherwise my parents probably wouldn't have taken me to see it when it came out. This film from director Tobe Hooper ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") became an instant classic in its depiction of a suburban family whose daughter is sucked into a netherworld of lost spirits.

Everyone remembers the scene where blond-haired pixie Carol Anne puts her tiny hands on the television screen, and creepily intones, "They're heeerrre!!" The forces she refers to as "the TV people" are in fact the spirits of the dead buried beneath their tract housing development in California. Mom (JoBeth Williams) will later get a first-hand encounter with them in the half-dug backyard swimming pool.

For me, the film really gets rolling when the paranormal investigators are called in to check out the home of the Freeling family. I love the scene where one of the science stooges explains to the father (Craig T. Nelson) about the amazing video he once recorded of a toy truck moving from one side of a room to another over the course of seven hours. He's trying to impress Mr. Freeling with what he considers a solid piece of evidence of the existence of ghosts, and Freeling just nods his head nonchalantly. Then he opens the door to his children's bedroom, where toys are flying around the room like a mini-tornado has invaded.

The other scientist is, of course, the guy who later peels the flesh off his face, in one of the movie's most famous scenes. It looks a little dated now -- you can easily spot the moment when they switch over to a special-effects mannequin -- but still horrifying enough to force my wife to look away. Personally, I prefer the bit a moment earlier when a steak crawls across the kitchen counter, then turns itself inside-out. (Although, who keeps an unwrapped steak on a plate inside their fridge?)

The moment that really sends a thrill up my leg is when the dwarf psychic Tangina (memorably played by Zelda Rubinstein) explains to Mr. and Mrs. Freeling exactly what has happened to their daughter. A powerful and nefarious force keeps her trapped in the netherworld between this plane of existence and the next. When Tangina says, "It lies to her," the hairs on my nape always stand on end.

On a side note, many people remember the tragic death of Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne, at the age of 12 from complications related to Crohn's Disease. But they forget that her screen sister, Dominique Dunne, also suffered a terrible fate, being strangled to death by an ex-boyfriend a few months after "Poltergeist" came out. She was 22. He brother is actor Griffin Dunne.

She apparently had long been a victim of domestic violence; she made a guest appearance on "Hill Street Blues" as an abuse victim, and didn't have to wear bruise make-up because she really had been beaten up by her boyfriend the day before. Horrible.

Perhaps inevitably, "Poltergeist" went on to have two sequels, both of which were pale reflections of the original. JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson wisely bowed out after the second film, leaving it to O'Rourke -- by then typecast as "the Poltergeist girl" -- to go visit her aunt and uncle for her newest haunting.

The other notable thing about the movie is the controversy over whether Tobe Hooper really directed the film. Steven Spielberg, who produced and co-wrote the screenplay, was reportedly on set most of the time and may have felt Hooper was not up to the task. Nelson and Williams have both claimed that Spielberg was the one who said "action" and "cut" during most of filming, and even coached the cast on their performances, until veteran actress Beatrice Straight (who plays the head of the paranormal scientists) objected.

Whether directed by Hooper or Spielberg or some bastard combination thereof, "Poltergeist" is one of the all-time great horror films.

4 stars

Bonus DVD review: "Deadgirl"

Just when you think horror films have violated every taboo known to mankind, along comes "Deadgirl" to shatter one we (hopefully) hadn't even considered: Zombie rape.

Yes, really.

The tagline for this stylish low-budget indie says it all: "You never forget your first time."

Here's the set-up: Two slacker teens ditch class to go drink some beers at the local abandoned insane asylum. Deep in the bowels of the musty building, they come across the body of a dead girl, chained up and covered in plastic, hidden in a room behind a door that rusted shut years ago. How did she get there?

Their questions will have to wait, because it turns out the girl is still breathing! She won't talk and behaves like a feral animal, snapping at them with her teeth.

Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez, a dead ringer for a young Joaquin Phoenix) wants to set her free, but his best friend J.T. (Noah Segan) has a more sinister thought: What if they just kept her? After all, it's doubtful anyone even knows she's here. They could use her as their sex slave.

Rickie is horrified, and they fight and argue, until J.T. discovers a terrible secret: The girl (Jenny Spain, who spends the entire movie naked) seems impervious to injury. J.T. "kills" her three times, but she keeps moving and twitching, even after being shot three times.

Rickie, who's got a thing for a rich girl at school (Candice Accola), determines to sneak in and free the girl, but discovers that J.T. has brought in their friend Wheeler (Eric Podnar) to take part in the debauchery.

Things really get hairy when a couple of jock bullies invade the zombie sex sanctum, and one of them takes up a dare to have the girl perform fellatio on him. Living dead+genitals=not good.

Despite its premise, "Deadgirl" really isn't a schlocky spoof, but a well-made and superbly acted (for a horror flick) film from directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, and screenwriter Treng Haaga.

Still, there are plenty of gross-out moments, including a severed limb, an upper lip that's bitten off, and a memorable scene in the school bathroom with some exploding guts splatting against the tile. The unrated DVD, which hits stores Sept. 15, includes some sections that are worth watching in slo-mo for the bloody special effects aficionado.

3.5 stars