JamesG
04-25-2011, 06:12 PM
Bloody Disgusting's List of 'Horror Unmakes'!
Monday, April 25, 2011
By: Chris Eggertsen
One of the most infamous remakes of all time is Gus Van Sant's pointless shot-by-shot interpretation of Psycho, which was released to a horde of "why did they bother?" admonishments and an almost complete lack of interest from the general public.
Putting aside the relative merits of the film's technical aspects, the update is generally regarded as a badly failed experiment and, perhaps even worse, an empty exercise on the part of a filmmaker too wrapped up in his own indulgences.
The remakes on the following list, by contrast, are those that veered in the exact opposite direction, completely (or near-completely) doing away with the original blueprints and putting a fresh spin on their inspirations. Whether the final products proved good or bad, all nevertheless presented themselves as bold (and occasionally cynical) reinterpretations – i.e. "unmakes" – of films from a bygone era.
Cat People (1942) / (1982)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/rosew_cat_people1942.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/catpeople.jpg
Paul Schrader's remake of the understated 1942 Jacques Tourneur classic took the basic premise of the original and updated it into a highly-visual and overtly erotic work.
Doing away with the mere suggestiveness of the Lewton-produced film by inserting an ample helping of nude bodies and bloody mayhem, Schrader and his writers also changed up the back-story by suggesting (in a vividly shot, red-hued prologue) that the cat people resulted from some ancient ritual in which adolescent girls were offered up to leopards as sexual partners.
While the remake directly references a couple of scenes from the original movie – particularly the famous "swimming pool" bit – overall it's a far more lurid piece of work that takes the subtext of the '42 version and runs wild with it.
Perhaps the biggest change in the plot was the addition of a long-lost older brother for Irena, a slinky character also prone to transforming into a large cat who suggests that the only way to fulfill their sexual desires is to mate with each other. While the reasoning behind this – that a cat person will inadvertently kill any normal human they attempt to have sex with – was a vital component of the original's plot, Schrader was clearly intent on spinning this conundrum in a more sensational direction – a description that can easily be applied to the film as a whole.
The Fly (1958) / (1986)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/220px-Theflyposter.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/fly1986.jpg
Never one to shy away from stomach-churning visuals, David Cronenberg fully utilized recent advances in special effects technology in service of updating 1958's campy mini-classic The Fly.
As a result, the film is far more gruesome than the original (a change that can also be chalked up to less-stringent censorship standards regarding on-screen gore), venturing into full-on body horror territory by featuring a gradual "man-to-fly" transformation as opposed to the instant transposition of human and insect body parts in the Kurt Neumann version ("Help me! Help meeee!").
What also set the '86 film way apart from its inspiration (aside from its obvious structural differences) was that, by dramatizing Brundle's slow and horrific physical decay, it opened itself up to a horde of speculative thematic interpretations, including the (false) assertion that it was intended it as an allegory for the degenerative effects of the AIDS virus (still more or less a death sentence at the time of the film's release).
In any case, Cronenberg (always a filmmaker with much on his mind) was able to skirt the camp pitfalls of the original by wedding his more cerebral sensibilities to an astoundingly well-crafted creature feature narrative. Not to mention that by putting the focus on the film's tortured central love story it managed to achieve a tragic, almost Shakespearean resonance that the original lacked.
Halloween (1978) / (2007)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/hallow_dvd.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/796019805582.jpg
Whereas John Carpenter's original focused on the idea of Myers as a pale-masked manifestation of inexplicable evil, Zombie set out to cast the killer as a man irrevocably damaged by a tumultuous white-trash upbringing. As such, a good portion of the film is set during Myers' childhood, taking us through the particular injustices (school bullies, abusive stepfather, whorish sister and stripper mother) that apparently brought him to the brink of murder and madness.
It's only about halfway through the film that we're introduced to Laurie and doomed friends Annie and Linda, a huge structural change that left many fans hoping for a more straightforward remake scratching their heads. In addition to its narrative differences, Zombie's version also substituted Carpenter's elegantly-staged sense of time and place with a more modern visual style, complete with rapid edits and a reliance on hand-held camera movements.
And whereas the kills in the original were practically blood-free, the remake presented them in an exceedingly raw and brutal fashion, echoing Zombie's more hammer-headed sensibilities.
While I would challenge anyone to claim that the '07 version is a better film, it was nevertheless a bold move for the rocker to so gleefully defy audience expectations.
The Haunting (1963) / (1999)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The20Haunting20DVD20cover.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/667068482126.jpg
Substituting all the subtle, sound effects-centric scares in the original for scenes of ridiculous CG mayhem, Jan de Bont's remake of one of the greatest supernatural horror films ever made was basically the 1963 Robert Wise version on speed.
Like that same year's The Mummy, it's far less a horror movie than an overblown action/adventure piece, with its characters rushing breathlessly through a mansion constructed as a mutated version of the elegant estate featured in the original film.
In the end, it's essentially one big showcase for the visual effects team, hammering the audience over the head with excessively-rendered sequences of overt supernatural happenings while sapping the story of all the dread-laced paranoia that was an essential component of the original (not to mention the classic Shirley Jackson book on which both films were based).
Maybe the most significant difference between the two films is that while Wise took care to keep the psychological underpinnings of the novel intact, de Bont neglected that element by choosing to focus much more on justifying the film's unnecessarily bloated $80 million budget with a series of whiz-bang action set pieces.
Whereas the unearthly goings-on in the '63 version seemed to echo and/or engender Eleanor's slow descent into madness, the '99 film sacrificed all subtlety by adding in a convoluted back-story that re-cast the home's original owner Hugh Crain as a twisted child murderer.
The threat bone-headedly externalized (thereby missing the entire point of the original story), the audience was then "treated" to a ludicrous climactic scene in which Eleanor heroically sacrifices herself to release the spirits of the murdered children from the house.
An improvement? Perhaps if your name is Michael Bay.
House of Wax (1953) / (2005)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/house_of_wax.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/dvd_houseofwax.jpg
Similar to Prom Night, House of Wax utilizes the title of an older movie (in this case, the 1953 Vincent Price mini-classic) in the name of boosting its commercial prospects without actually bearing any resemblance to the original film.
While the 1953 version (which itself was a relatively faithful reboot of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum) also featured young people being stalked by a crazed museum curator, the plotting differed quite substantially, with the remake following a contemporary slasher template as opposed to peddling in the macabre horror/mystery conventions of the Price film.
In addition, the 2005 version takes place in a spooky rural town seemingly lost to the sands of time, eschewing the NYC locale of the Andre de Toth-directed original.
Probably the most severe difference between the two films, outside the heightened gore quotient of the remake (though the '53 version was actually quite gruesome for its day), is that while the first movie featured a typically aristocratic and subtly creepy central turn by Price in the antagonist role, the updated version's killers are essentially of the "backwoods slasher" variety, given very little personality outside their obvious predilection for murdering hot young twenty-somethings.
In short, it's the very definition of an "in name only" reboot.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958) / (1978)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-movie-poster1.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers78CollEd.jpg
For starters, the location was drastically changed from the pristine bubble of small-town California to "Me Decade"-era San Francisco, thereby substituting the clean-cut denizens of Santa Mira for a group of post-Watergate big city yuppies.
The '78 version is also much more graphic in its visualization of "body snatcher" assimilation. Unlike in the 1956 film, the remake opens with the gooey aliens in pre-human form on their home planet, and in later scenes the gruesome effects of their duplication methods are depicted in queasy detail (including a disturbing effects shot depicting the accidental "grafting" of a man's head onto the body of a dog).
In addition, unlike the original these body snatchers don't merely point and run when they find a human in their midst but emit a horrific, ear-piercing screech to alert their compatriots. Invasion '78 is also, like its 1956 inspiration, a film distinctly of its time, supplanting the "Red Scare" paranoia of the original with satire incorporating themes specific to the touchy-feely, self-help-centric period of the late 1970s.
Also more contemporary was the filmmakers' decision to end on a grimmer note than the Don Siegel-directed incarnation (not to mention the novel), thereby fulfilling Siegel's earlier intention (prior to studio interference) of concluding the story with a far more pessimistic denouement.
The Mummy (1932) / (1999)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The-Mummy-1932.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The20Mummy.jpg
While there had previously been several attempts to remake The Mummy more in the spirit of the 1932 original (separately by directors Clive Barker, George A. Romero and Joe Dante), at the end of the day Stephen Sommers won the job by pitching it as a big-budget event film in the spirit of Indiana Jones.
As such, while the basic premise remained the same (archeological expedition inadvertently awakens the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep from his tomb), The Mummy 1999 is a completely different beast – less a horror film than a high-flying adventure movie, with Brendan Fraser standing in for Harrison Ford as the wise-cracking hero.
In place of the spooky atmospherics of the Boris Karloff version, the remake featured a plethora of high-octane action sequences enhanced with boatloads of CGI scarabs and mummies, not to mention that silly giant sandstorm.
And whereas the original Karl Freund-directed version, with its expressionistic lighting and doom-laden ambience, took its story completely seriously, Sommers inserted a "wink-wink" screwball sensibility that kept the enhanced stakes (typical of its big-budget Hollywood roots, Imhotep was now of course determined to take over the entire world as opposed to cursing a few unlucky archeologists) from feeling too weighty.
Can't upset the kiddies now, can we?
Monday, April 25, 2011
By: Chris Eggertsen
One of the most infamous remakes of all time is Gus Van Sant's pointless shot-by-shot interpretation of Psycho, which was released to a horde of "why did they bother?" admonishments and an almost complete lack of interest from the general public.
Putting aside the relative merits of the film's technical aspects, the update is generally regarded as a badly failed experiment and, perhaps even worse, an empty exercise on the part of a filmmaker too wrapped up in his own indulgences.
The remakes on the following list, by contrast, are those that veered in the exact opposite direction, completely (or near-completely) doing away with the original blueprints and putting a fresh spin on their inspirations. Whether the final products proved good or bad, all nevertheless presented themselves as bold (and occasionally cynical) reinterpretations – i.e. "unmakes" – of films from a bygone era.
Cat People (1942) / (1982)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/rosew_cat_people1942.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/catpeople.jpg
Paul Schrader's remake of the understated 1942 Jacques Tourneur classic took the basic premise of the original and updated it into a highly-visual and overtly erotic work.
Doing away with the mere suggestiveness of the Lewton-produced film by inserting an ample helping of nude bodies and bloody mayhem, Schrader and his writers also changed up the back-story by suggesting (in a vividly shot, red-hued prologue) that the cat people resulted from some ancient ritual in which adolescent girls were offered up to leopards as sexual partners.
While the remake directly references a couple of scenes from the original movie – particularly the famous "swimming pool" bit – overall it's a far more lurid piece of work that takes the subtext of the '42 version and runs wild with it.
Perhaps the biggest change in the plot was the addition of a long-lost older brother for Irena, a slinky character also prone to transforming into a large cat who suggests that the only way to fulfill their sexual desires is to mate with each other. While the reasoning behind this – that a cat person will inadvertently kill any normal human they attempt to have sex with – was a vital component of the original's plot, Schrader was clearly intent on spinning this conundrum in a more sensational direction – a description that can easily be applied to the film as a whole.
The Fly (1958) / (1986)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/220px-Theflyposter.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/fly1986.jpg
Never one to shy away from stomach-churning visuals, David Cronenberg fully utilized recent advances in special effects technology in service of updating 1958's campy mini-classic The Fly.
As a result, the film is far more gruesome than the original (a change that can also be chalked up to less-stringent censorship standards regarding on-screen gore), venturing into full-on body horror territory by featuring a gradual "man-to-fly" transformation as opposed to the instant transposition of human and insect body parts in the Kurt Neumann version ("Help me! Help meeee!").
What also set the '86 film way apart from its inspiration (aside from its obvious structural differences) was that, by dramatizing Brundle's slow and horrific physical decay, it opened itself up to a horde of speculative thematic interpretations, including the (false) assertion that it was intended it as an allegory for the degenerative effects of the AIDS virus (still more or less a death sentence at the time of the film's release).
In any case, Cronenberg (always a filmmaker with much on his mind) was able to skirt the camp pitfalls of the original by wedding his more cerebral sensibilities to an astoundingly well-crafted creature feature narrative. Not to mention that by putting the focus on the film's tortured central love story it managed to achieve a tragic, almost Shakespearean resonance that the original lacked.
Halloween (1978) / (2007)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/hallow_dvd.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/796019805582.jpg
Whereas John Carpenter's original focused on the idea of Myers as a pale-masked manifestation of inexplicable evil, Zombie set out to cast the killer as a man irrevocably damaged by a tumultuous white-trash upbringing. As such, a good portion of the film is set during Myers' childhood, taking us through the particular injustices (school bullies, abusive stepfather, whorish sister and stripper mother) that apparently brought him to the brink of murder and madness.
It's only about halfway through the film that we're introduced to Laurie and doomed friends Annie and Linda, a huge structural change that left many fans hoping for a more straightforward remake scratching their heads. In addition to its narrative differences, Zombie's version also substituted Carpenter's elegantly-staged sense of time and place with a more modern visual style, complete with rapid edits and a reliance on hand-held camera movements.
And whereas the kills in the original were practically blood-free, the remake presented them in an exceedingly raw and brutal fashion, echoing Zombie's more hammer-headed sensibilities.
While I would challenge anyone to claim that the '07 version is a better film, it was nevertheless a bold move for the rocker to so gleefully defy audience expectations.
The Haunting (1963) / (1999)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The20Haunting20DVD20cover.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/667068482126.jpg
Substituting all the subtle, sound effects-centric scares in the original for scenes of ridiculous CG mayhem, Jan de Bont's remake of one of the greatest supernatural horror films ever made was basically the 1963 Robert Wise version on speed.
Like that same year's The Mummy, it's far less a horror movie than an overblown action/adventure piece, with its characters rushing breathlessly through a mansion constructed as a mutated version of the elegant estate featured in the original film.
In the end, it's essentially one big showcase for the visual effects team, hammering the audience over the head with excessively-rendered sequences of overt supernatural happenings while sapping the story of all the dread-laced paranoia that was an essential component of the original (not to mention the classic Shirley Jackson book on which both films were based).
Maybe the most significant difference between the two films is that while Wise took care to keep the psychological underpinnings of the novel intact, de Bont neglected that element by choosing to focus much more on justifying the film's unnecessarily bloated $80 million budget with a series of whiz-bang action set pieces.
Whereas the unearthly goings-on in the '63 version seemed to echo and/or engender Eleanor's slow descent into madness, the '99 film sacrificed all subtlety by adding in a convoluted back-story that re-cast the home's original owner Hugh Crain as a twisted child murderer.
The threat bone-headedly externalized (thereby missing the entire point of the original story), the audience was then "treated" to a ludicrous climactic scene in which Eleanor heroically sacrifices herself to release the spirits of the murdered children from the house.
An improvement? Perhaps if your name is Michael Bay.
House of Wax (1953) / (2005)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/house_of_wax.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/dvd_houseofwax.jpg
Similar to Prom Night, House of Wax utilizes the title of an older movie (in this case, the 1953 Vincent Price mini-classic) in the name of boosting its commercial prospects without actually bearing any resemblance to the original film.
While the 1953 version (which itself was a relatively faithful reboot of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum) also featured young people being stalked by a crazed museum curator, the plotting differed quite substantially, with the remake following a contemporary slasher template as opposed to peddling in the macabre horror/mystery conventions of the Price film.
In addition, the 2005 version takes place in a spooky rural town seemingly lost to the sands of time, eschewing the NYC locale of the Andre de Toth-directed original.
Probably the most severe difference between the two films, outside the heightened gore quotient of the remake (though the '53 version was actually quite gruesome for its day), is that while the first movie featured a typically aristocratic and subtly creepy central turn by Price in the antagonist role, the updated version's killers are essentially of the "backwoods slasher" variety, given very little personality outside their obvious predilection for murdering hot young twenty-somethings.
In short, it's the very definition of an "in name only" reboot.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958) / (1978)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-movie-poster1.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers78CollEd.jpg
For starters, the location was drastically changed from the pristine bubble of small-town California to "Me Decade"-era San Francisco, thereby substituting the clean-cut denizens of Santa Mira for a group of post-Watergate big city yuppies.
The '78 version is also much more graphic in its visualization of "body snatcher" assimilation. Unlike in the 1956 film, the remake opens with the gooey aliens in pre-human form on their home planet, and in later scenes the gruesome effects of their duplication methods are depicted in queasy detail (including a disturbing effects shot depicting the accidental "grafting" of a man's head onto the body of a dog).
In addition, unlike the original these body snatchers don't merely point and run when they find a human in their midst but emit a horrific, ear-piercing screech to alert their compatriots. Invasion '78 is also, like its 1956 inspiration, a film distinctly of its time, supplanting the "Red Scare" paranoia of the original with satire incorporating themes specific to the touchy-feely, self-help-centric period of the late 1970s.
Also more contemporary was the filmmakers' decision to end on a grimmer note than the Don Siegel-directed incarnation (not to mention the novel), thereby fulfilling Siegel's earlier intention (prior to studio interference) of concluding the story with a far more pessimistic denouement.
The Mummy (1932) / (1999)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The-Mummy-1932.jpg
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/The20Mummy.jpg
While there had previously been several attempts to remake The Mummy more in the spirit of the 1932 original (separately by directors Clive Barker, George A. Romero and Joe Dante), at the end of the day Stephen Sommers won the job by pitching it as a big-budget event film in the spirit of Indiana Jones.
As such, while the basic premise remained the same (archeological expedition inadvertently awakens the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep from his tomb), The Mummy 1999 is a completely different beast – less a horror film than a high-flying adventure movie, with Brendan Fraser standing in for Harrison Ford as the wise-cracking hero.
In place of the spooky atmospherics of the Boris Karloff version, the remake featured a plethora of high-octane action sequences enhanced with boatloads of CGI scarabs and mummies, not to mention that silly giant sandstorm.
And whereas the original Karl Freund-directed version, with its expressionistic lighting and doom-laden ambience, took its story completely seriously, Sommers inserted a "wink-wink" screwball sensibility that kept the enhanced stakes (typical of its big-budget Hollywood roots, Imhotep was now of course determined to take over the entire world as opposed to cursing a few unlucky archeologists) from feeling too weighty.
Can't upset the kiddies now, can we?