The original Poltergeist, directed in 1982 by Tobe Hooper under writer-producer Steven Spielberg, was chiefly a commercial concern: a funfair Exorcist that ditched its predecessor's spiritual agonies for more material, Reagan-era concerns. It helps that the director charged with renovating this ghost train, Gil Kenan, sets about his task in the manner of his fantastic 2006 digi-mation Monster House. Lights flicker, things go bump in the night and - thanks to 3D - much of it lands centimetres from your face. Again, it's reasonable fun while it lasts. Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt play the Bowens, making a fresh start by installing themselves and their three kids in suburbia. Their new home, inevitably, has a few glitches, with the electromagnetic disturbances attributed to nearby power lines. Yet their youngest, Madison (Kennedi Clements), still winds up pressed to the TV, and son Griffin (Kyle Catlett) is unsettled by toy clowns.Around these holdovers, Rabbit Hole playwright David Lindsay-Abaire scatters tantalising flickers of subtext. Where the first movie's Freelings were upwardly mobile baby boomers, the Bowens are subject to austerity-age stresses - not least trying to raise three kids on a diminishing income. There's also room for a little character: since no one person was ever likely to match Zelda Rubinstein's inimitable work as the original's psychic, we instead get chewy parts for Jane Adams and Jared Harris as the academic and investigator running tests for paranormal activity.Mostly it's a scare machine, and in this respect Kenan's is the more efficient telling, its VFX lubricating all that now creaks about the original: the 3D enables such shameless jolts as comin'-atcha drill bits, but also reimagines Madison's haunted closet as a completely enveloping black hole.The Poltergeist phenomenon was always just a ride, inviting us to pay over the odds for some cheap thrills; adding a 3D surcharge scarcely addresses that. Accept it, however, and the remake has been engineered in broadly the right carnival spirit. It should shift a lot of popcorn, if nothing else...