From the Vaults: Remakes

editor's note: this earlier post, while unsophisticated in its writing, sets the stage for an essay scheduled to appear on Thursday.

Last week I was asked how I felt about remakes in general, and to some extent the over-reliance on them to prop up the film industry in the last few years. I thought I'd share my answer with you folks, plus a few other thoughts:

I don't know that I have an opinion on remakes in general, to be honest. I guess it depends on who's remaking the movie, why, and what they're planning to do with it.

The Maltese Falcon, for example, is a remake of a remake of an adaptation, but I really like that movie.

John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is among my favorite of his movies. Remakes of his films haven't been so successful, however (Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, I'm assuming Halloween, and certainly Escape from New York aren't going to work).

What sets his remake of The Thing apart from The Thing From Another World (or the story both are based on, "Who Goes There?") is that while the plot outline is basically the same, Carpenter does something very different with the movie. It's the same reason I enjoyed Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake.

It's all the rage to remake horror movies from twenty years ago right now, which I guess isn't anything new (like I said, Falcon had three incarnations before 1945), but sometimes I can't help but think "why remake that?"

There's no reason to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still. I can't see how modern cgi is going to make Gort more imposing, or how the story is going to work considering how much the media and technology have changed in the last fifty years, but there's money to be made from it, so I guess more power to them.

There are some directors I wouldn't mind being able to see remake their own films, like Don Coscarelli. I really would have no problem with him remaking Phantasm, because as much as I like the original, he had very little to work with and the film suffers for it. Not just in the effects, but the editing and the sometimes jagged plot leaps.

But overall, there are some movies that stand well enough alone, and there's no point re-doing them. Remaking The Third Man, which isn't currently happening but certainly could, is an awful idea. I'm so glad the remake of Casablanca with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez fell apart. But I'm not a soulless Hollywood executive looking for a lazy buck, so who knows what's coming next?

Some additional thoughts:

* Part of my reticence to see Rob Zombie's Halloween comes from Zombie's reason for re-making Halloween in the first place: I just don't care how Michael Meyers came to be The Shape, or whatever you want to call him. The thing that's really effective about Carpenter's Halloween is that there is no reason for why he does what he does (or, in several instances, goes out of the means of an average slasher to do it, specifically the way he kills Lynda, but also the drawn out stalking of Annie and Laurie), he just does it. Both times you actually see Michael's face (as a child and again towards the end), he's a blank slate, totally emotionless. I don't need to know that his step father beat him and that his mother was a stripper that didn't love him. Who cares? And one of the things I never really liked about Halloween II that Zombie felt the need to retrofit into his remake was the "Laurie is Michael's sister" angle. The less you know about the killer, the better. Freddy was scarier before he was the "Bastard son of a hundred maniacs"; Jason was more effective as that hillbilly survivalist freak that crept around the woods.

* I realize that several of the movies I mentioned in the initial answer were based on books or stories, and as such it's a little dodgy calling different versions of them "Remakes". I mean, Peter Jackson didn't really remake Ralph Bakshi, did he? Or Rankin and Bass, for that matter. I suppose that's trickier territory, but the film's do have an attachment for people who've seen another version. For example, I think it's fair to assume when the Peter Pan movie came out a few years ago that folks were at the very least thinking of the Walt Disney version while watching it.

* Why are horror remakes so prevalent right now? Well, for one thing, most of them can be made on the cheap. Since the originals weren't made for much, it only stands to reason that you throw a few reasonably recognizable faces on the screen, make it for a few million dollars, market the shit out of it right before it comes out, and turn a profit on opening weekend. It worked for House of Wax. It's working for Halloween. It worked for The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Dawn of the Dead. Is it going to work for April Fool's Day? Probably not (future Cap'n interjecting here: it didn't), but even if they just barely perform, there's dvd and foreign sales to at least recoup the loss. They're certainly cheaper than something like Escape from New York or The Day the Earth Stood Still, both of which are being remade as I type this, and will no doubt have more substantial budgets than the Troll remake, for example.

* As I've said before, remakes are really nothing new. Go to any place that sells or rents dvds and poke around for a while. How many versions of Ben Hur are there? King of Kings? The Ten Commandments? Other than the name, what's so different about and Double IndemnityBody Heat? How many King Kongs are there (hint: more than two)?

* Hitchcock and Ozu both remade their own films, for instance. This isn't really anything new, it's just easier to pick up on because of the availability of the films being remade nowadays, especially if a particularly savvy (read: greedy) company decides to re-release the film on dvd right before it comes out in theatres.

We don't have to like it, even if it is nothing new, and you can do something about it by not going to see it. Or maybe you do want to. They're not all bad, no matter what the reactionary tells you. And believe it or not, there are some movies that could benefit from a remake. Consciously or not, I believe that when Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead, he did the movie Equinox a great favor, by taking a similar premise and giving it a proper shake. As it is, Equinox is an interesting student film, but The Evil Dead, with almost exactly the same concept, is a cult classic.

Do remakes have their place? Yeah, maybe; just like any other genre of film, there'll be good and bad ones, and accordingly, it's difficult to make blanket statements about them. The ones I like don't replace the originals, they just sit alongside them. The ones I don't just kind of sit off to the side, forgotten with all the bad original movies that clog up the cineplex every year. C'est la vie.