This week, I don't want to talk about anything new. I don't want to discuss the good news about studios and European exhibitors finally agreeing on a virtual print fee. I don't want to comment on Nielsen's research showing the strong consumer appetite for 3-D films (I'll be talking enough about 3-D next week in anticipation of Journey to the Center of the Earth). I don't want to even get people's hopes up about Microsoft's supposed "manners device" that silences cell phones instead of blocking them (signal blocking was recently found to be illegal in the U.S.). I really don't want to comment on Mark Gill's "The Sky is Falling" speech from the L.A. Film Festival loosely concerning the state of art house cinema (the speech is more related to film making and financing, plus I already played Chicken Little last week).

If you're one of the millions of kids who weren't able to snag (i.e. afford) tickets to see Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus in concert, you now have an opportunity to see the next best thing. For one week in early February, a film of one of the concerts will be shown at movie theaters nationwide. And to make it seem even more like you're attending the real thing, the film is in 3D! Compiled from three concerts in two cities from the "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds" tour, the Disney-produced film is directed by Bruce Hendricks (Ultimate X: The Movie) and was shot using 3D digital cameras rather than shot with regular digital cameras and rendered in the format later (meaning sorry, no 2D versions of this one), as has been the case with most digital 3D movies so far. By the way: the cinematographer in charge of those cameras is Transformers DP Mitchell Amundsen.

Not only is this a big deal for Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus fans, but also it's a huge deal for theater owners and their continued attempts to offer substantial alternative entertainment at their cinemas. I'm sure you all know this isn't the first concert to be shown in theaters. There have been Rolling Stones concerts, drumline concerts, Metropolitan Opera performances, Dane Cook stand-up concerts, and many other events. Some of them have even been broadcast live to theaters via satellite. Many of them, such as today's (Dec. 2) live presentation of the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, are one-day-only events.

As I pointed out in my Poltergeist review, I didn't watch much horror as a boy. That's probably a good thing, as even the non-horror flicks I enjoyed often scared the bejesus out of me. You kids today don't know how lucky you have it with your wussy Shreks and your lamewad Pikachus! Children of the 1980s are still in therapy over what Hollywood deemed "family films" back then. The following non-horror mind-screws should prove my point.

Return to Oz (1985)

In high school, I brought Return to Oz to a Halloween movie marathon. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. Everyone scoffed. "A Wizard of Oz sequel? That's supposed to scare us?" I didn't hear a lot of mockery after the movie started. In fact, nobody said a word until about halfway through, when a friend of mine whispered "Can we please turn this off?" I'm not sure who thought this movie was appropriate for children. It gave me nightmares for nearly a decade.

Dorothy finds a key with an Oz symbol on it, shows it to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry as proof that Oz exists, and is sent to an insane asylum! An evil insane asylum where they give our young heroine electro-shock therapy! That's how this "childrens' film" starts! Once Dorothy gets to Oz, it's a speeding night train of horrors. How about that Nome King? Good LORD! Winged monkeys aren't scary enough anymore, let's give the kids The Wheelers -- sadistic shrieking psychopaths with roller skates instead of hands and feet! Kids today won't be satisfied with just a standard wicked witch, let's really ramp that up too, and ruin their lives! The sequence with the witch's cabinets full of human heads easily rivals anything in the Nightmare on Elm Street series for sheer terror. "Dorothy Gaaaaaale!!!!"

Even the heroes are horrifying! Jack Pumpkinhead? A hybrid stick n' pumpkin creature who calls Dorothy "Mother"? That's your good guy? Not cool, Return to Oz. Not cool.

The Neverending Story (1984)

Along the same lines as Return to Oz, The Neverending Story feels way too dark, weird, and just...wrong to be a kids' movie. I feel my eyes welling up now remembering Atreyu's horse slowly sinking into quicksand and dying. I can't even talk about the Gmork, that big wolfy vampire thing. And a storm called "The Nothing?" Sweet fancy Moses! Also, again, the heroes should not be scarier than the villains! The racing snail? The Rockbiter? That bat-dude? And Falkor? A big flying dog/dragon mutation with disgusting scaly eggs on his skin? We were supposed to root for this hellacious beast?

Another scream-inducing aspect -- one of the worst theme songs in all of 80's film. And that's saying a whole lot!

Don't look directly into its eyes!

I wasn't a kid who grew up watching Freddy and Jason. I was a huge comedy nerd, and was never a big fan of being terrified. I saw Poltergeist around age 10, and it was one of my very first horror films. I was scared just putting the VHS tape in the machine, but its rating calmed me down considerably. After all, how scary could a PG-rated movie be?

The answer? Extremely.

To me, Poltergeist is the perfect horror movie. It is genuinely scary, it is genuinely funny, and you genuinely care what happens to the characters. It's even got some dynamite commentary going on -- the television is full of evil! The genius of Poltergeist is that it takes the haunted house and plops it smack dab in the middle of suburbia. It's not a creepy Transylvanian mansion, it looks a lot like where most people grow up. The Freeling family looked a lot like my family, and that made it all the scarier. Like many Steven Spielberg films, Poltergeist juxtaposes the fantastical with the real in a way that the viewer doesn't doubt for a second.

It can be hard to pick scary movies for a group of adults to enjoy -- unless you go the family film route, and who wants that? Some people can watch an eye be plucked form a skull, or a slow, terrifying scene scored with creepy music and be in heaven; others will squeeze their eyes shut and plug their ears to escape what they consider hell. While brainstorming ideas for Cinematical's month-long tribute to all things creepy, scary, and gory, I had the bright idea to cover scary flicks for the wimpy -- those people who squeeze, plug, and hate to be scared.

I didn't quite think about how antithetical this idea was. If it's scary, the wimpy won't like it, and if it is too watered down, it isn't scary any more. To make things even more difficult, everyone has different ideas about what is scary. For example, I consider Psycho to be scary for its time and not-so-scary now. Chilling, yes. Nail-biting or hair-raising? No. My friend, however, just looked at me like I was insane for including it on this list. Where in the heck do you go from there?

Comedy always works. The funnier the gore, the less scary it is. But this isn't a comedy list, so there has to be some sort of variety, and this is how it will work: the following is a list of movies you can watch with your more wimpy friends, but still have those ever-loved Halloween themes, and at least a little gore or a few jumps. They are listed from wimpiest to least-wimpy -- all of which should fall well below the truly scary films out there. If anyone finds the lower-rated ones too much to bear, you should probably stay away from anything scary, the evening news, and the absolutely frightening Showgirls.

Our pals at the world's busiest Poltergeist fan site dropped us a line to remind us of the news: That Special Edition we've been wondering about for a few months finally has a release date. DVDActive.com helps fill in some of the blanks ... and let's just say those blanks are pretty disappointing.

Oh, it'll be great to enjoy Poltergeist in swanky widescreen with remastered 5.1 audio, absolutely. But um, for a DVD with the phrase "25th Anniversary Edition" on the cover, I'm afraid the extra features all sorts of underwhelming. Seems that the only extra will be a two-part documentary feature called "They Are Here: The Real World of Poltergeists Revealed," which I'm pretty sure is a barely-related "ghost hunters" piece. Oh, and the original theatrical trailer. Let's not forget that.

But what happened to the cast interview we heard about? Will we get no insights from Steven Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, Jerry Goldsmith, Frank Marshall, Michael Grais, Mark Victor, Richard Edlund, etc., etc.? Really?? Well that's really very disappointing. I'm guessing Warners had a bunch of goodies set up, but someone somewhere didn't want the material out there. But nope, no commentaries, no retrospective featurettes, nothing. If that angers you, do what us movie nerds do all the time: Sign a petition! The mysteriously skimpy "SE" hits shelves on October 9.

Although we've heard very little that could be deemed "official," it seems to be a pretty foregone conclusion that a shiny new Special Edition of Steven Spielberg's Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is poised to hit DVD shelves within the next several months. Yes, there's been vague talks of remakes and/or sequels, but if you're looking for a modern-day ghost story that's as slyly amusing as it is hellaciously creepy -- you're going to want to see Poltergeist again soon.

According to this Poltergeist fan site, a group of professional Ghost Trackers were recently interviewed and filmed on their rounds. Who was doing the filming? The folks putting together the supplemental material for the new Poltergeist DVD, that's who. And hooray, says me. It's been too many years since I've sat down with Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams and the rest of the ill-fated Freeling family. (And yet despite all that horror, can anyone tell me the actual body count in Poltergeist? I'll give you a hint: It rhymes with "hero.")

One of the very few movies out there on which Steven Spielberg receives a screenplay credit, Poltergeist has become a favorite chiller of kids and grown-ups alike since 1982. I think it's one of the best 'haunted house' movies ever made, to be honest. There's no set date for the inevitably doubled-disced Poltergeist re-issue, but according to those Ghost Tracker guys, both Mr. Nelson and Ms. Williams have already been interviewed for the package. Now throw on a few audio commentaries, an FX breakdown and a full-bore 'making of' documentary, and you'll have I DVD I need to own. I'm betting this one hits the shelves well before Christmas.

So tell me: Which of these is scariest? The clown, the tree or the swimming pool? (Trick question: It's the steak!)

I've never seen any of the films written or directed by Eric Red -- unlike Scott, who is a big fan -- but I like the sound of his comeback effort, 100 Feet. It involves a woman under house arrest for killing her abusive husband, who just so happens to be haunting the house she can't leave. Sounds like a combination of Cherish, Double Jeopardy and The Gravedancers, all of which I enjoyed to some degree (and two of which starred cast members of Prison Break -- not that this is important).

Now, in addition to liking the premise, I like the star of 100 Feet, too. JoBlo.com exclusively announced that Famke Janssen will play the captive/terrorized woman, and the site quoted Red as saying he plans for her to evoke Audrey Hepburn's Oscar-nominated performance in Wait Until Dark. I like Janssen a lot and think she's due for a role that takes her acting talents serious, but I doubt this will get her that level of acclaim. I do believe she will do a good job of carrying the film and its potentially emotional scenes, hopefully enough that it will propel her toward other work that will get so recognized. After all, she's a better actress than her two female teammates in the X-Men movies, and both of them have Academy Awards.

When a fansite dedicated to Poltergeist III announced news of a possible Poltergeist IV, frankly my first question was -- why is there a Poltergeist III website in the first place? As pointed out by webmaster David Furtney on the site's home page "even bad movies have some good things about them." Fair enough. This past Saturday Furtney received some news from MGM senior executive vice-president Charles Cohen. "We are working on a Poltergeist idea, and hope to have some news to announce shortly. Stay tuned."

Frankly, I feel about as revved up for this as I did about the War Games sequel I posted about back in October, which is to say not at all. After all this time, does the Poltergeist franchise name still carry any clout? Granted, the original is a classic, but didn't anyone learn anything from the sequels? The series initiated with 1982's Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper, though the film's style seems to owe more to writer and producer Steven Spielberg. In the film, a nice suburban family named Freeling are beset by all manner of supernatural phenomenon in what had to be the flashiest haunted house movie up until that time. A sequel was released in 1986 and another in 1988, with Poltergeist: The Legacy, an in-name only TV spin-off, launching in 1996. This is not the first time sequel sequel talk has circulated, in fact Furtney has a section of his site dedicated specifically to rumors of a Poltergeist IV.

OK, here's the portion of your day in which I mention that someone's about to get working on a Poltergeist remake and you get all annoyed and frustrated and decide to write a strongly-worded rant in the comments section, only you forget to approve your comment via email, which means nobody will ever know your opinion that A) Poltergeist is a classic, B) classics shouldn't be remade, and C) "screenwriter" Steven Spielberg really ghost-directed the movie for Tobe Hooper.

But we already know all of these things, and apparently that knowledge is not going to stop a remake from getting made. According to BD.com, the original plan was to take a work-in-progress called Poltergeist: Kayeri and retrofit the thing into some sort of "re-imagining" of 1982's second-best horror movie. But now it looks like the Poltergeist remake will be starting entirely from scratch ... and the more time they need the better, if it's me you're asking. (Well, I know these remakes are inevitable, but I'm certainly not in a huge hurry to see what some first-time rock-video director and a guy who once wrote three episodes of The X-Files would do with one of modern cinema's very finest ghost stories.)

And I'll use this scant piece of semi-news to remind you how pretty darn awesome Poltergeist actually is. Smart, spooky, playfully dark, just gory enough to please the geeks and just mild enough to warrant a Friday night family movie night. If you haven't seen the flick in a long time, I highly recommend you give Poltergeist a second visit. But dear sweet jeebus, please stop after the first one. The sequels are house-devouringly bad.

And while we're on the subject, doesn't Poltergeist seem like a movie that's just screaming for a swanky new 2-disc Special Edition DVD? Frankly the current DVD kinda sucks.

UPDATE: The illustrious SpielbergFilms.com, which I DO consider a reliable source tyvm, is reporting that this project is (as of this moment) not happening. Stay tuned for additional news -- if there is any.