I’d like to see a good remake of the obscure Italian film The Arrival of Wang (stop snickering) about an alien captured in Rome and subject to brutal interrogation - but the only Earth language the alien speaks is Chinese, and the translator they bring in isn’t sure where her loyalty lies. The original was a clever twist on the theme of ambiguous morality and the ending, while predictable, is unconventional and decidedly unambiguous. However, the middle was kind of a mess as they stretched out and repeated some sections unnecessarily and it’d be nice to have another shot at it, especially as the original isn’t well-known. I doubt it would do well in the US though; it’s a bit of a downer.
Gyrate: you’re correct; those two Body Snatcher adaptations flew right under my radar. And, despite their anemic reviews, I’m willing to hold off passing judgment until viewing them.
But, I must say, I wasn’t blown away by the short “Where you gonna go?” clip I just watched on YouTube. It had a distinct “TV movie” feel to it, including the cheesy soundtrack. The male actor looked and acted like John-boy Walton. I liked Richard Thomas just fine on Walton’s mountain, but neither he nor his look/act -alike doppelgänger should be play-acting in horror flicks.
Tilly plays excellent mother-earth, new-age waifs (e.g. The Big Chill), but she did not knock it out of the ballpark with the “Where you gonna go?” speech…at least not for me. Maybe I need to watch the movie in its entirely for proper context.
And, The Invasion (’07) looks like the kind of movie I should put on my Netflix play-list to watch after the apocalypse, when all people are dead and it’s the sole surviving movie (I’d watch it before another Adam Sandler movie, though).
Nobody’s ever really filmed the book, honestly. If there’s a Dracula movie my husband hasn’t seen I’d be shocked (he just edited a book of essays on vampire movies and if he hadn’t restrained himself the damned thing would have been six hundred pages) and I agree none of them have really 100% worked. And they mostly flunk the shipboard bit, which is truly disturbing, although one of them I halfway watched recently did do a nice version of the discovery of the ship - can’t remember what it was though.
Ok, they have never been made, so it’s hard to get them remade, but the The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt series) by John Bellairs with Gorey illustrations just needs to be made into a family friendly “scary” film.
I am informed it was the Dan Curtis version, but that it was quite a brief scene I’m remembering.
I’d love to see Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” redone. The first one (“made for TV” if I remember correctly) featured David Soul and wasn’t bad (in my estimation) but I never liked that the vampire, who talked in the book, was made into this grunting thing in the movie (granted, a very scary-looking “grunting thing”). So that’s my pick. I hope someone gets around to it at some point.
Here we go again! What exactly are you worried about if a great movie is remade? In what way does it adversely affect you, whether the new movie is a bust or a success? I only see it as a potentially good thing (good reviews; go see it and enjoy), with virtually no downside (bad reviews; stay home and play bingo).
I mean, would you be satisfied watching just one Broadway performance of Hamlet your entire life? Would you be satisfied listening to just one Karajan symphony performance of Beethoven’s 9th your entire life? Would you be satisfied eating just one perfectly char-broiled T-bone steak from Morton’s your entire life? Would you be satisfied engaging in just one hot sexual encounter with a large breasted nymphomaniac (or, whoever floats your boat) your entire life?
If you answered “yes” to more than one of the above questions, then you either have an exceptionally low pleasure center plateau…or you have a screw loose.
But, if you answered “no” to most of the questions, then: why are you satisfied to see just one version of a movie you like very much?
I liked Linda Blair very much in the Exorcist, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a new young actress perhaps projectile vomit chicken stew & dumplings instead of pea soup this time. I would like to see her head spin around counter-clockwise instead of clockwise this time. I’d like to see her take a dump on the floor instead of peeing…, well, no, I don’t really want to see that, but, you get my point, don’t you?
Want a little variation added to the new movie? Would that make it more acceptable for you? Ok, we can do that. How about for the Jaws remake, instead of using a shark as the antagonist (Peter Benchley is on record saying he regretted misaligning the Great White in his book, creating much backlash against the species), we use a Bluefin tuna? Hell, a rogue Bluefin has a legitimate reason to want to go on a murderous postal rage against people, we’re decimating his species.
Want to go in an even more extreme direction with Jaws? We’ll call it Crawls: a sociopathic sea cucumber gets in a pickle and all hell breaks loose. What’s that, you don’t think a sea cucumber can bring on the gore and violence? How about you ask my Uncle Oscar about that! Oh, wait, you can’t…he was violently murdered by a sea cucumber.
So, I know y’all are opposed to remaking great movies…but, tell me why?
It would be interesting to see what The Midnight Game might be like if they had a much bigger budget. For the money they spent on it the results were pretty decent, but it was clear that funding was what kept it from being even better.
Oh, and The Mist. With the book’s ending this time.
It was redone in 2004 with Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, and Rutger Hauer on TNT. I honestly don’t remember my feeling toward it (like/hate/meh).
Because it then become difficult to discuss it. For example if I mention that cheesy but fun SciFi show Battlestar Galactica people assume I am talking about that later dark travesty.
Talk about the Biplane scene in King Kong and then you have to go into which one?
I think the book holds up surprisingly well, and has lots of great “cinematic” moments, which makes it all the more disappointing that it has never been turned into a film masterpiece.
One thing for which I will give Coppola credit is the seduction of Jonathan Harker by the female vampires. That was pretty close to how I had pictured it while reading the book. In general, the early castle scenes were the best part of that movie. (Well, except for Dracula’s butthead hairdo, which was just odd.)
How about a reboot of the Dr. Phibes series.
There was a version done by the BBC in 1977 that’s (from what I hear) pretty faithful to the book. Louis Jourdan plays the title role. It was shown on PBS in the states at least once.
I’m sure there are some clips from it on Youtube.
The 1960 version of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine was very good, and the morlocks were pretty frightening (at least to pre-school me). It didn’t hurt that I had a huge crush on Weena (move over Samantha Stevens, there’s a new blond in my heart). I didn’t see the 2002 version, but the reviews look lackluster and the trailer didn’t impress me.
Making the monster what we split-speciate into in the future is a premise that can’t be beat, so I think it’s time to make a good modern version of Time Machine.
Also from that period was my favorite giant lizard. No, not Godzilla, Gorgo! Actually, Gorgo still stands up as a good film (check it out on YouTube in its entirety). It’s a British made movie, so you get to see London destroyed instead of Tokyo.
But, Gorgo didn’t scare me, he (and his bigger-ass mom) became my imaginary heroes and I even had my friends convinced that I could make him appear from over the horizon whenever we needed some bullies to be squashed (my friends were 24 at the time, so they were pretty gullible…just kidding, we were all ~5). Anyway, that bastard Gorgo never did appear at my calling, so I had to make a lot of excuses (“he must be taking a nap”).
Just to be clear, Weena, the one I had a crush on, is the one lying down in the photo.
I’d like to see The Incredible Shrinking Man redone, make the spider a little scarier and the effects a little more realistic. But I’m afraid that they would go too far and make the effects dominate the movie.
Viggo Mortensen was supposedly considered for a movie to be made about the ship bringing Dracula to England. It was indeed a chilling chapter in the book! And it could have been an equally creepy movie, but alas, it seems to have fallen through.
You and I are very much eye to eye on this. Stories have been told and retold since the beginning of time. New themes explored. New ideas included. New cultures and generations catered to. That’s always been a thing. There’s nothing inherently unoriginal or lazy about an artist giving his/her own spin on a work of art. As long as its* his/her* spin.
I have no idea how a remake/reboot/reimagination can hurt some classic that already exists. Or why it needs to better than the classic to justify its existence. It exists for the same reason all art exists. Either it’s well made or it isn’t. Either consume it or don’t.
This whole, ‘Nooooo, don’t touch my movie,’ thing kinda smells too much like possessiveness to me.
Speaking of Dan Curtis, I’d line up to see a remake of “Burnt Offerings”. Not that there’s a thing wrong with the original. I’m not even sure it could be *improved *upon but it would be interesting to see an updated version.
Note to potential director: it is not necessary to make the chauffeur a knife wielding maniac; his foreboding presence and ominous grin is enough. Ditto the father’s temporary descent; please don’t give it the Ryan Reynold’s Amityville Horror treatment.
Speaking of Dan Curtis, can we pretend that the Tim Burton Dark Shadows travesty didn’t happen and instead redo that?