Completely agree. The only point for the new one seemed to be to show how CGI has outpaced “practical” effects. But the reason to see the movie in the first place was the over-the-top black humor, which the remake completely lacked.
Red Dragon was good and well-made, but Manhunter did the job so beautifully that Red Dragon looks anemic by comparison. The only point to making RD I can see is that it makes the story consistent with the other Hannibal Lector films, and gives Anthony Hopkins another opportunity to play the character.
H.P. Lovecraft, like Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. wells, has generally not fared well in cinematic adaptations of his works.
American International, having pretty much exhausted poor Poe, turned their interest to Lovecraft by adapting The Dunwich Horror in 1970. The film featured some sex and nudity, which is itself about as far from Lovecraft as you can get. It’s also an appallingly bad adaptation of the relatively straightforward story that leaves you wondering what the hell you just watched. Dean Stockwell stars as Wilbur Whateley, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Fast forward to 2009. Dean Stockwell’s back in a remake-for-TV of The Dunwich Horror, this time playing Henry Armitage. It’s still a confused mess. You’d think that by 2009, with all the advances in effects, they could tell the story in a simple straightforward fashion. But it’s still a mess. You can’t say the remake was more disappointing than the original, because they’re both pretty awful.
According to Wikipedia, Toei animation made a clay animated version, which I’ve neve seen, but don’t have high hopes for.
The original Clash of the Titans (1981) was Ray Harryhausen’s last hurrah as dimensional animator, and he went out with bang – an all-star cast, including Sir Laurence Olivier as Zeus. The script by Beverly Cross (who had scripted Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts) was sufficiently literary and savvy with Greek mythology and literature that you could spend a lot of time digging for Easter Eggs. The live-action direction by Desmond Davis was better than most of Harryhausen’s films.
But it was a Harryhausen film, of course, so it’s not really an attempt to tell the myth properly – it’s a pegboard on which to hand Harryhausen’s animated figures, so we got weird detours like Calibos and the Giant Vulture and the mechanical Bubo the owl (which Harryhausen swore had nothing to do with R2D2, but it’s hard to believe). And, of course, we got Zeus as Perseus’ divine benefactor, rather than Athena. Well, if you’re going to pay Olivier, you want to get your money’s worth. Susan Fleetwood as Athena got almost nothing to do except insist on keeping her owl. And Ketos/Cetus the Sea Monster got renamed after to SCandinavian “Kraken” because, well, I guess it sounded cool. Nevertheless a good film, and an appropriate curtain call.
The 2010 remake really was a temake of the 1981 movie, rather than a re-telling of the original myth – they kept a lot of the weird excursions from the first film. You’ve still got Zeus as Perseus’ protector (now played by Liam Neeson), and now we’ve got Ralph Fiennes as Hades because modern Western storytelling denands a Good Guy and a Bad Guy, so Hades and Zeus square off against each other, as they do in Disney’s Hercules, a circumstance the ancient Greeks would have found bewildering. We get the Giant Scorpions from the first film, and the Kraken (still with that alien name) and the Gorgons and the “Stygian Witches” (Graiae) and Charon and even, Zeus help us, Calibos. Pegasus shows us, a black horse for the first time I can recall. There’s even a cameo with mechanical Bubo. There is some clever writing (I like the way Perseus’ companions have to deal with his being virtually invulnerable while they aren’t, and trying to goad him into reluctant action.) But the main point seems to be to show off how special effects have improved since the first film was made. (They even keep the half-serpentine Medusa, an innovation that was original with Harryhausen, who stole the idea from himself – the half-snake belly dancer from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) And, of course, the post-production 3D. Although there were some nice touches, I prefer the original overall.
If you want to see the real story of Perseus and Medusa, get Jim Henson’s The Storyteller Greek Myths episode on Perseus and Medusa from 1991
AIP had also adapted The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in 1963, under the title The Haunted Palace. They pitched it as a Poe adaptation, although it has nothing to do with Poe’s poem of that title. It’s another Roger Corman-Vincent Price collaboration, this time with Lon Chaney, Jr. also along for the ride. It’s a fairly loose adaptation, but it’s pretty good if you like the Corman-Price style of that era. It was also the first major film adaptation of Lovecraft, so it’s an important work in that regard.
Dan O’Bannon did a more faithful adaptation in 1992, under the title The Resurrected, with Chris Sarandon as Ward/Curwen. Even though it had a very limited theatrical release, and was mostly a direct-to-video feature, I think it’s pretty good.
A guy I know from college did a very low budget film of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. I haven’t seen it, and wouldn’t know enough Lovecraft to tell if it’s any good.
I’ve heard about it, but haven’t seen it.
I’ve seen The Haunted Palace. It’s pretty dismal, in spite of the presence of Lon Chaney, Jr.
Lovecraft adaptations have been getting more faithful and better in recent years, not only the ones from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, but also from others.
The HPLHS’s silent version of Call of Cthulhu is pretty good and faithful to the source. I think it’s on Tubi (free with ads).
I wish I were in the timeline where Guillermo del Toro had been able to make In the Mountains of Madness.
Their version of The Whisperer in Darkness is pretty good, too, if not quite as faithful.
Or The Hobbit films.
I truly loved his version of Frankenstein.
But there is Cast a deadly Spell, which is very good.
Guillermo del Toro making a light hearted fantasy, made for young readers? Nope. He does horror.
I mean…he was the director until it ran overschedule.
I have gone through this thread looking but has anyone seen both La Cage aux Folles and The Birdcage? The latter of course is the American remake of the French film. The basic plot is the same but the neat little differences and I like them both.
The American movie Victor/Victoria is a favorite of mine, but I have never seen the German original Viktor und Vicktoria. Has anyone seen the German version? I believe it was made in the 1930’s.
Gaslight (1944) with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer is a remake of Angel Street (1940) (original tile Gaslight) starring Diana Wynard and Patrick Hamilton. Both were adapted from a stage play called Gas Light. There was a movie made in 1912 called The Gaslight Story, but that film seems to have been lost.
When MGM bought the rights to the story to film the 1944 version, there had a clause put into the contract requiring all prints of the 1940 version to be destroyed. Fortunately, they didn’t succeed in eliminating the older film. I believe the 1944 version is the better movie, but I don’t like for creative works to be destroyed.
A Star Is Born has been made several times. The best-known version, from 1954, starred Judy Garland and James Mason. It was a remake of a film of the same name starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. There are also movies of different names that tell pretty much the same story, like The Artist (2011).
But it’s not a version of a Lovecraft story. It has Lovecraftian elements.
as I think I noted, there have been some good and faithful adaptations of Lovecraft in recent years, which are worth the watching.
I thought the play was called Angel Street. At least that what the Samuel French scripts we used were called when I PSM’d it in college.
The two versions of The Dawn Patrol differed little from each other, except for their casts:
[The Dawn Patrol (1930 film) - Wikipedia]
[The Dawn Patrol (1938 film) - Wikipedia]
His Girl Friday is basically a remake of The Front Page, but its snappy dialogue and cast headed by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell put it over the top.
[The Front Page (1931 film) - Wikipedia]
[His Girl Friday - Wikipedia]
The 1936 and 1957 versions of My Man Godfrey are also basically the same, but I think the first one is better. Not because it stars William Powell instead of David Niven, who was a brilliant actor, but because the ending was altered substantially in the second. (Niven’s character turns out to be an illegal alien who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII.)
The same story was remade in 1988 as Switching Channels, with the setting changed to a cable TV newsroom.