To be honest, I don’t generally care much one way or another about remakes.
That might have something to do with the psychology that
goes into my movie ratings system. Typically I start a movie at two
stars (which shows up as “mildly amusing” when I write the review). Then
if it does something to impress me it climbs up the scale. On the other
hand, if it does something to piss me off it slides in the other
direction. That’s why so many movies end up ranked squarely in middle of
my system: they simply don’t make much of an impression on me.
So by the law of averages, remakes tend to end up in the same vast middle of the pack as their originals. I don’t love ‘em. I don’t hate ‘em. Some have advantages that the original didn’t (such as improved special effects between Invasion of the Body Snatchers versions one and two), while others suffer from drawbacks (such as the reliance on special effects over plot and character between The Haunting versions one and two). But overall things even out. Even if the original is a classic and the remake dimmer by comparison (such as Dawn of the Dead versions one and two), that’s not really the remake’s fault. It can still be pleasant viewing even if it doesn’t shine as brightly as the first one.
So why does the title of this list suggest that movies should never be remade? Simply put, the loss of remakes to a draconian rule would be a small price to pay if in exchange we managed to rid the world of pictures like these eight. These movies all have two things in common: they suck and they contribute nothing to the world that wasn’t there the first time around. That combination amounts to a wicked purposelessness not found in movies that stink merely of their own accord.
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick original. James Mason made a perfectly smarmy Humbert. Shelly Winters was great as “the Hays woman.” And then of course there’s Peter Sellers. What about any of this called for a remake? To be sure, the Kubrick version wasn’t perfect. The novel does some things the movie doesn’t. But Adrian Lyne clearly has no interest in correcting flaws. Instead, he comes up with a trashy, perfume-ad celebration of pedophilia, a disgusting mess in which Humbert and his “girlfriend” become romantic leads in a Friday After Dark soft-core picture. The production manages to suck all of the humor and panache out of the source novel, leaving only a crude narrative about perverted sex. If you want soft-core, rent something that isn’t designed for the Dateline: To Catch a Predator crowd (unless of course you actually are a potential DTCAP customer). If you want Lolita, rent the first one. Or better yet, read the book.
The Manchurian Candidate - The Frankenheimer original is a must-see masterpiece of Cold War paranoia. As such, it’s very much a creature of its time. It might have been possible to dispose of the specter of the International Communist Conspiracy and update the story to the 21st century (perhaps using China as the title conveniently suggests). Or the new version could have been left in the original setting. But no, instead the remake sets up a company as the source of all evil, as if an international corporation couldn’t easily place an apparatchik in the White House without resorting to the slightest subterfuge. The clearest symptom of remake failure here: the brilliant, innovative brain-washing sequences from the original are replaced by nonsensical mush that wouldn’t pass muster on MTV let alone in a serious movie.
Psycho - Several critics – including me – accused the remake of being an elaborate, expensive colorization of the original. But honestly, that’s giving it too much credit. Hitchcock’s version is technically sophisticated enough to stand on its own. Colorization would have been a slight detraction (easily corrected by adjusting some settings on the DVD player). But no amount of knob-fiddling could ever transform Vince Vaughn into Anthony Perkins. Indeed, most of the parts of this picture that aren’t word-for-word copies of the first one are stupid additions, such as the odd jump-cuts crammed into the shower murder, visual non-sequiturs far too reminiscent of Benny Hill making fun of Swedish pornography. That’s a good example of the quality of the experience one gets from the remake.
Halloween - John Carpenter’s earlier horror movies are – at least in theory – ripe for remake. He tended to do innovative work that was rough around the edges. Halloween is a perfect case in point. The original is a genre classic, a picture that helped establish many slasher movie standards. However, budget limitations left it a little spit-and-tissue-paper here and there. Sometimes that was an advantage and sometimes it wasn’t, so I’m willing to concede the possibility that it could have done with a little sprucing up. Ah, but then we get Rob Zombie, an “auteur” with a seemingly limitless affection for filth and degradation. From his developmentally-disabled perspective, the hero of the movie is a kid who tortures animals, grows up in an asylum and graduates to torturing women. The leap from the four-star original to the less-than-zero remake is the greatest drop ever between the first go-around and the second.
The Omen - As with Halloween, the original is a genre classic. If nothing else, it put Revelation 13:18 on the pop culture map. The remake does nothing. If it had been a stand-alone picture, it would have come and gone with little notice. On the one hand, that’s a problem. Being an Omen remake at least gave it some marketing potential. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have suffered from comparisons to a vastly superior movie. Thus this picture is the poster child for the problems with remaking movies. If you’re not going to do anything that will surpass the first one, why not just make something original instead?
Stephen King’s The Shining - I enjoy King’s writing. I’ve been reading his novels since I was a kid. However, I’m not going with him on this ride, simply because it’s way more about his ego than it is about entertaining his audience. The original was a Kubrick picture that functions quite well despite not remaining flawlessly faithful to the source novel (and if that doesn’t sound familiar, go back and re-read the first entry in this set). Clearly the infidelity pissed King off. His anger isn’t entirely unjustified. Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance makes Jack Torrance into a barely-repressed psycho right from the start, and Shelly Duvall’s Wendy is far too annoying to be a sympathetic victim. Conversely, this time around Jack is played as not crazy enough. And if sticking to the novel was a big concern, this made-for-TV miniseries doesn’t do the job either. The fact that King himself came up with the innovations – particularly the “secret identity of Tony” nonsense – doesn’t make them any more welcome. Those who want to watch a good horror movie can rent the original, and those who want King’s version can read his book. What function does the remake serve?
All the King’s Men - Here we get a solid refutation of one of the apparent tenets of remake-making: throwing a lot of money at a production will automatically make it better than the original. Clearly not so. Part of the first one’s charm was its rough-around-the-edges production quality. The remake puts a stop to that in short order. It has an expensive cast. It has a pensive script. It has over-wrought cinematography. What it doesn’t have is the smallest taste of authenticity. As Oliver Stone already proved by casting Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, Hollywood’s vision of Louisiana is far more Hollywood than Louisiana. This just throws another log on the fire.
King Kong (1976 and 2005) - I don’t even know where to begin.
On the other hand …
The original Howard Hawks The Thing from Another World is one of the dumbest things ever done with strips of helpless celluloid. The two-fisted Army men versus the blood-drinking space carrot and the monster-coddling pinko-commie intellectual scientists? That wasn’t even in keeping with its own time, let alone ours. But Carpenter’s version is so radically different that it barely even counts as a remake. Instead of a paean to xenophobia, we get a chilling tale of men destroyed as much by their own paranoia as by the intruder hidden among them. And it goes without saying that the carrot suit isn’t even in the same ballpark with Rob Bottin’s special effects. So in this rarest of rare cases, the remake is one of the best horror movies ever made while the first one is one of the worst.
No comments:
Post a Comment