I have to admit I was apprehensive picking this up on BD after reading just merely above average reviews for the PQ alone. But I have to say, I was very very happy with the image. I'd give it a 4.5/5.0. And compared to newer films like, say, "L.A. Confidential" BD, a film released 15 years later, the PQ was 10 times better. The sound was also great. This is a classic film too. I can't believe DVD Talk reviewer Adam Tyner only gave the movie an overall 3.5/5.0. It's the grand daddy of haunted house/ghost films. I tend to agree with this review:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies...40&show=review

Poltergeist is a classic, but I personally would give that grand daddy mantle to Robert Wise's "The Haunting"

You are absolutely right, of course. I stand corrected. Nothing can beat Robert Wise's "The Haunting". And probably never will. I still think "Poltergeist" is up there with it. Also, "The Others". Can't wait for both that and "The Haunting" on BD.

I agree. The film looked very, very good for its age. I wasn't expecting Poletergeist to get a great treatment on Blu-ray, but a great treatment it has. It was an unexpected treat.

or even 'The Innocents' from Fox.

Grabbed this from Netflix and it was definitely a pretty picture. I hadn't seen the film in years and it is a good one. Not that it needs to be said again, but too bad we didn't get a nice documentary on the production and the lives and deaths of the cast.

Hoping to take advantage of some Black Friday deals and enter the world of Blu-ray. "Poltergeist" is one of the first on my lists.

Has anyone compared the unconverted DVD (which I already own) PQ to the BD?

I haven't compared the 2, but I agree with everyone else, wasn't expecting anything great, but definitely surprised me. Was a really pretty picture.

I watched it while trying to count all the people who'd end up dead..

Keep your eye on Amazon.com. This dropped from $24.95 to $19.95 with no notice, then back up to $24.95. I just happen to catch it by luck when it was lowered so I purchased it. I honestly expected the picture to be just as subpar as "L.A. Confidential" or any older movie. But the PQ seriously knocked me out. It's up there with "The Thing" being the best PQ BD for a movie that old.

THE HAUNTING is Robert Wise's only saving grace for having dismantled Orson's THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

Is the Poltergeist disc snapped into a tray, or in a sleeve in this book/case?

In a tray like other DigiBooks

The Uninvited is pretty lightweight in comparison to The Haunting or The Innocents, but it's still one the better classic-period haunted house films. Inexplicably unavailable on DVD.

This is one of my favorite haunting flicks, and the BD looks great. That being said, I'm still VERY bumed that they didn't include any worthwhile features. Given the production history of the film and the people involved, I was hoping for more. The booklet is very cool, though.

Sad thing is there are hours and hours of features...yet the previous DVD was canned for various reasons so they never materialized here.

They should have put an extra on the disk where an arrow would point to every cast member who died.

That'd be a good use of BD-Live.

He directed several other excellent films, including The Set-Up, Curse of the Cat People, Executive Suite and Odds Against Tomorrow.

That's just wrong.

I know. My buddy has the fan-made 5-disc set with hours upon hours of BTS footage. Thanks for the inadvertent reminder to have him burn it for me...

Ahhh man....I need a copy of that *cough*

Not to mention The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sand Pebbles, West Side Story, and (though I'm personally not a fan) The Sound of Music.

To say that "THE HAUNTING is Robert Wise's only saving grace for having dismantled Orson's THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS" is outright ridiculous considering the magnitude of his career. And the Ambersons re-edit wasn't his call at all. The studio mandated the changes, and he was the unfortunately soul who had to make them.

Yeah, really *cough* *cough*

I meant to post this query months ago when I rented this title from Netflix... now, I'm considering purchasing it, but I'm concerned that the disc is missing a portion of a sequence.

Specifically, I think there may be missing footage that takes place in the scene where Diane is demonstrating the unusual phenomena in the kitchen to Steve with the chairs and Carol Ann moving across the floor, etc. Right in the middle of that scene ("the middle" at least as I recall it), there's an extremely abrupt cut to the scene where the couple is at the neighbor's door asking if he'd noticed anything funny going on. I thought... a fairly abrupt elipsis that I didn't recall from my many prior viewings? I backed up, watched it again, and it seemed to me that there was a small chunk of the film missing (a little bit from both scenes, the end of the former and the beginning of the latter). But I didn't have another version on hand to compare, and decided to bring it to the experts here... and totally forgot until now.

So, has anyone else noticed this? Again, this is the Netflix rental, which may defer from the regular release.

I noticed the cut too when I watched this on TCM a few weeks back.

But... that's not right. Or is it?

I don't want to get too far out on the limb here as I'm going totally on memory, but like many of you I watched this film about a million times when it was among the more ubiquitous movies on early cable programming. I'm all but certain we're missing a decent chunk of that scene, but I have to acknowledge that it's only you and me, big e, who seems to believe there's a problem here. And memory is just too mutable to be entirely trustworthy.