Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Please, someone save us from the remakes

So it has come to my attention that, once again, a John Carpenter movie is going to be remade.

And this time that auteur Rob Zombie is coming for Halloween, and I am going to do what I suspect he is going to do to that movie to a famous quote by Pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came the Hammer Horror Films
and I did not speak out
because I was not a fan of Hammer.
Then they came for Psycho
and I did not speak out
because it was Hitchcock for god's sake.
Then they came for the tv shows
and I did not speak out
because they were remaking tv, how bad could those movies be.
Then they came for Halloween
and there were no properties left
to save me from that horror.

As you can see, I've not only trivialized the intent of the original by adding a lot of needless pop culture references and gore, but I've destroyed anything important it originally have to say.

Think I am once again over-reacting? Let's look at the Carpenter remake checklist, shall we?

Assault on Precinct 13 - What did they do to the taut original version? Wrecked it, that's what.
The Fog - Wow... I've seen air accidents on Mayday that were prettier than that disaster.

Even Carpenter remaking Carpenter was horrible (Ghosts of Mars... blech!). So my question is: have the bones of Michael Myers and that mythology not been picked enough, and is it not an unprecedented move to remake the first movie in a series that saw its last installment just 4 years ago. I mean, it is just bizarre.

I wonder if all these movie remakes are part of the reason why literary plagiarism is seemingly on the rise these days. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if there really was a correlation.

1 comment:

MC said...

Hilly: Well, she could be sitting beside you during a flight.

Mr. Fab: Well, that's true, but the remake was still worse, and that is saying something.