Not any sort of official series, but especially during the summer months, remakes and sequels are, if nothing else, great excuses to review the films that came before. As I am above no excuse to review a film, I must answer the call.
I would like so much to proclaim the original Poltergeist as a fascinatingly accidental volcanic meeting of disparate, jagged minds, the harsh nihilism of director Tobe Hooper jutting out into the heart of the sticky-sweet nostalgia of producer Steven Spielberg, whose nostalgia is in turn engulfing the nihilism of the director. Ideally, the two seminal figures in arguably the first AAA horror film of the early ’80s (the genre’s introduction into the big leagues of crass, craven ’80s consumerism) would have had their nails at each others’ throats like a cage match between a devil-worshiping, corpse-eating, grave-residing raven and an elegant, iconographic American eagle. Even if the two minds burnt each other out, the battle would be a bile-spewing front-row-seater if ever there was one.
At its best, Poltergeist almost gets there. Introducing us to Steven and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) who reside in a regimented, rigid California suburb with their three children: Dana (Dominique Dunne), Robbie (Oliver Robins), and Carol Anne (Heather O’ Rourke), all of whom bear a grand-old Americana name if ever there was one. Now, most suburbs have their everyday problems…rats, tax collectors, salmon shorts, but ghosts is another story (I must concede, however, that salmon shorts may be the greater evil still). One night, Carole Anne discovers first-hand that something is up, and as time moves on, things begin to bump a little too much in the night for this family to handle.
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After Earth is the sort of bad movie anyone could have made, which is disappointing after the release of three tried and true “M. Night Shyamalan”-encrusted bad movies of the sort that only his holiness could make. Or Kirk Cameron, maybe. But the point is there was a certain personal touch of badness on display, and following that tripartite masterpiece of anti-filmmaking, After Earth is just bad movie leftovers. 
Edited January 2016
M. Night Shyamalan is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when you thought he’d hit his true low, and just when you thought less creative control over his material would save the day, he pulls a fast one and comes up with something even worse. As it turns out, Shyamalan can vividly ruin a known property about as well as he can dream up mindless drivel of his own creation.
And then he made The Happening. Lady in the Water was a collage of self-important grand movie statements about the state of the world doctored up by a man who had not one clue what the world was, let alone how to convey that on the screen. What could be a better counter to the big-boy statements of a preachy message film than an elementally chilly exercise in pure nihilism and horror? With the idea for The Happening, Shyamalan seemed to be at least listening and returning back to the muck and earthen horror of what he does best (indeed, atmospheric horror is the only thing he ever did well). Ideally, The Happening could have been an exercise in humorless style and pure cinematic horror, entirely visual and lacking in any of the pretentious import of Shyamalan at his worst.
A note on “worst”: As mentioned before, this series is an attempt to dissect some of the alleged “worst” movies of all time, and primarily not a hope to actually find them. It is ridiculous and arguably mean-spirited to refer to any of M. Night’s films as among the worst ever made. They are a special sort of badness, and he is now four films deep into a wonderful, scorching form of incompetence, but it is wrong-headed to claim that “the worst movies ever made” all happen to be well-budgeted Hollywood films from the past ten years from a major director and with major stars.
It isn’t difficult to find issue with Beyond Thunderdome, nor is it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of the problems: Hollywood money, and the desire to go big or go home. Both things that Miller used like a sledgehammer in Fury Road 30 years later to wonderful effectiveness, but which here see him step up and trip over the need to focus on a plot that doesn’t much go anywhere. The pure cinema appeal of the series is certainly lost (with Fury Road, Miller managed to go big without inducing a case of the talkies), but it doesn’t do well to overly criticize something for simply having a more elaborate story. Still, admittedly, the focus on “plot” for Beyond Thunderdome sacrifices the queasy, nihilistic immediacy of the original Max and the off-kilter humor and the implacable malaise hanging over The Road Warrior, a malaise brought on precisely by the fact that the film never much “went” anywhere plot wise and established, instead, a feeling of stagnancy.
Update 2018 with Roeg’s passing: Slightly less taken with Walkabout’s politics this time out. As a critique of settler colonialism, it’s both vaguer and less eloquently abstract than Peter Weir’s wonderful Picnic at Hanging Rock, a truly poignant and critical take on a cloistered community corseted by their own haze of superiority and indifferent curiosity about other ways of life.
Right from the beginning, Planet of the Apes settles itself on a nexus between tactile action and implacable inaction. The prologue, set on a spaceship as astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) throws his throaty baritone into a mission log, establishes the very 2001: A Space Odyssey sub-Kubrickian cosmic chill of the material. Taylor, along with Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton), are on an amorphous vision of an intentionally nebulous, even pointless nature; what matters is not where they are going or why, but the existential frostiness of the pallid white of the ship’s interior and the very present deadened quality in Heston’s worrisome but unconcerned voice.
When we last left him, former police office Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) lost his family and his best friend, and had fulfilled a most unfulfilling form of revenge on the now lawless highways of the Australian outback. He had lost and repaid the loss only to realize that there was nothing to be won back. When we last left him, there was nothing left for him but the empty road.
The Long Take 