Word: poltergeist
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Chargling that the massage is worn, the acting pedestrian and the storyline weak should not imply that E.T. fails altogether. It effectively accomplishes its modest goal: to entertain on a warm June evening. Unlike the other half of Spielberg's summer twinbill, Poltergeist, which is supposed to scare, while conveying big statements about the origins of fear and modernism--fumbling on all counts-- K.T. succeeds in providing two hours of carefree...
...Also anything that might be under the bed or in the closet. Also Dragnet on TV. Also a crack in the bedroom wall-I thought ghosts might come from it." For Spielberg, film making has been a profitable form of psychotherapy: those boyhood fears form the spine of the Poltergeist plot...
Like Lucas, Spielberg has earned the right to create and shape his own film projects, whether or not he is the nominal director. He had planned only to produce Poltergeist, but soon found himself rewriting the script (from his original story) and, word had it, taking over from Director Tobe Hooper, who had surged to midnight-movie prominence seven years earlier with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a relentless exercise in terror set, like Poltergeist, in a darkened house. He might have had a chance if he had banned Spielberg from the set. But Spielberg had chosen the cast...
Spielberg hopes that with E.T. and Poltergeist he will be taken seriously as a director of actors. He has every reason to be. In both pictures, the children are natural and winning. As the mother in Poltergeist, Jobeth Williams, who Spielberg predicts could some day be on a par with Jill Clayburgh, creates a surprisingly rounded character. She gives the movie audience an electrifying shiver the moment her character feels Carol Anne's spirit moving through her body. In E.T., Dee Wallace has some quietly affecting scenes as Elliott's mother, who cannot quite hide from her children...
...director as autocratic auteur, in the French model. In fact Spielberg is the kind of American, extremely intelligent and utterly unintellectual, who can baffle Europeans. He claims without regret that his mental development stopped at 19. When he says he is not satirizing the amiable suburban householders of Poltergeist, who never turn off their television set, he means it. He has no quarrel with subdivisions, polyester, freeways, patio living, junk food for belly or mind, or people who sometimes seem to be cassette-recorded copies of each other. His lively mind grew out of such a mulch...