Books, Arts & Manners: E.T. Etc.

Every national magazine would seem to have had a cover story celebrating the simultaneous release of Poltergeist and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, and the glory of their creator, Steven Spielberg —which is about as close to canonization as you can get in this secular society. Of the two films, Poltergeist is by far the lesser, so let’s get it out of the way first. It takes place in a suburban housing tract, the residence of whose chief real-estate salesman, Steve Freeling, the poltergeists take over. At first they rather amuse him and his with-it wife, Diane (the couple smoke pot at bedtime), though they scare the bejesus out of their younger children, Robbie and Carol Anne. (Dana, the eldest, often sleeps out and seems to be a bit of a swinger.) So long as the poltergeists content themselves with raising fairly complete havoc with the house and its inhabitants, the Freelings, absurdly, try to cope with the situation. When the spirits spirit away little Carol Anne, the parents get frantic and call in a team of parapsychologists, who, however, prove even more incompetent than their hosts.

Eventually, a dwarfish spiritualist, Tangina, is summoned, and she challenges the poltergeists more seriously. I can’t begin to summarize the absurdities— some of them stickily metaphysical— that Tangina rattles off, or explain the enigmatic machinations of the imps. Finally it is Diane who goes into what seems to be the maw of hell gaping inside a closet of the house (a concept borrowed from such equally dreadful movies as The Sentinel and The Amityville Horror) and, at the cost of enormous physical and psychic suffering, returns through the ceiling with her daughter, both of them covered with a writhing substance that appears to be part infestation of worms, part Jello. Do the Freelings now leave their house? No such brains; they stay on for another night of agony and special effects.

JS

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John Simon

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Every national magazine would seem to have had a cover story celebrating the simultaneous release of Poltergeist and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, and the glory of their creator, Steven Spielberg —which is about as close to canonization as you can get in this secular society. Of the two films, Poltergeist is by far the lesser, so let’s get it out of the way first. It takes place in a suburban housing tract, the residence of whose chief real-estate salesman, Steve Freeling, the poltergeists take over. At first they rather amuse him and his with-it wife, Diane (the couple smoke pot at bedtime), though they scare the bejesus out of their younger children, Robbie and Carol Anne. (Dana, the eldest, often sleeps out and seems to be a bit of a swinger.) So long as the poltergeists content themselves with raising fairly complete havoc with the house and its inhabitants, the Freelings, absurdly, try to cope with the situation. When the spirits spirit away little Carol Anne, the parents get frantic and call in a team of parapsychologists, who, however, prove even more incompetent than their hosts.

Eventually, a dwarfish spiritualist, Tangina, is summoned, and she challenges the poltergeists more seriously. I can’t begin to summarize the absurdities— some of them stickily metaphysical— that Tangina rattles off, or explain the enigmatic machinations of the imps. Finally it is Diane who goes into what seems to be the maw of hell gaping inside a closet of the house (a concept borrowed from such equally dreadful movies as The Sentinel and The Amityville Horror) and, at the cost of enormous physical and psychic suffering, returns through the ceiling with her daughter, both of them covered with a writhing substance that appears to be part infestation of worms, part Jello. Do the Freelings now leave their house? No such brains; they stay on for another night of agony and special effects.