http://www.poltergeistiii.com/poltergeistIV.html

And no, i didn’t necissarily find the film scary, but I don’t find many films scary in general. I’m saying that for me, the main focus of the film is the family and Jack slowly losing his sanity, not the ghostly images. But his breakdown is different then the breakdown of Jeff Daniels character in the Squid and the Whale because The Shining is a genre film. He’s trying to kill his family in a haunted hotel. It’s apples and oranges.

Nah seriously, if you thought the movie was scary, I guess that’s alright. If the Johnny line made you grip your seat with anxiety, then I can see why you would defend its presence, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense. Sometimes a movie can work emotionally without having to work intellectually. It just didn’t work for me at all, which I was pretty sad about because that was one of the only horror movies I thought would have a chance of working for me, and actually be worth watching.

As for the line coming out of nowhere…he’s going insane. He may tend to spew shit that doesn’t make sense.

Which is why I brought up all the standard horror elements in the movie (little girls, ominous blood), to which you replied that that wasn’t what it was about.

It’s not that I think the line is cheesy, it’s just that it comes out of nowhere and somehow is supposed to have this emotional punch or whatever? Like it literally makes no sense that he would just scream out something like that. That’s why I think maybe some sort of set-up (not necessarily what I conjured up, lord knows I’m no Kubrick) would have made it at least make sense.

“Personally I find the father in Squid and the Whale to be infinitely scarier than Jack Nicholson’s overthetop insanity.”

Teen pregnancy and AIDS are also much scarier than Jack Nicholson’s over the top insanity, but this is a horror movie. Not an after school special.

Even if the line is a reference it’s still retarded. How does it apply? That would be like him saying “The horseman comes and tonight he comes for you” or something like that… It makes no sense.

If he had been watching a VHS tape over and over with that soundbite in it, because it was all the entertainment they could find, and we had been introduced to that line and heard it over and over, gradually becoming more and more a representation of his own insanity, it would have worked much better.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0118460/

It was a 1997 mini-series directed by Mick Garris, creator of the Masters of Horror cable series. Steven Webber played Jack, and apparently it’s a more faithful adaptation of the book.