'Poltergeist' scares up more laughs than screams

To call "Poltergeist" laughable is not the same thing as saying it's bad (although it is that, too.) It's just that it seems less interested in scaring you than in making you chuckle.

At least on that score it succeeds.

The spookiest thing about this pointless and weirdly silly remake of the 1982 ghost story is ... a squirrel in the attic. And the most effective use of its 3-D is a shot of a squirrel trap, seemingly poking out into the audience from a hardware store counter. (This, in a movie where a tree comes to life and snatches a child out of his bed. What a waste of good FX.)

As Count Floyd used to say on the old SCTV skit "Monster Chiller Horror Theater": "Oh boy, that's scary stuff, isn't it?"

I'm not even sure that "remake" is the right word here. Directed by Gil Kenan (known for the Oscar-nominated animated comedy "Monster House") from a script by David Lindsay-Abaire, this "Poltergeist" feels less like a reboot of the original film than a smirkily ironic, DJ-style remix of its best-loved tropes.

The famous line "They're here"; the child communicating with the dead through a TV set, before getting sucked into the beyond, through the closet; the heroic family member going after her at the end of a sturdy rope, like some paranormal spelunker - all these elements are stitched together, like music samples, into an unrecognizable yet insistently self-referential soup, along with the most hackneyed cliches from the contemporary horror canon.

"Paranormal Activity"-style video footage rubs up against that creepy kid from the J-horror classic "Ju-on: The Grudge." Animatronic skeletons out of "Pirates of the Caribbean" writhe in an "Insidious"-style underworld. And black ooze, apparently imported by the barrel from Amityville, New York, flows like water.

It also doesn't help that Sam Rockwell, as the father of the little girl who gets spirited away, delivers every line like he's auditioning for the "Ghostbusters" reboot.