Remakes. They've been dime-a-dozen for years, and the
success rate isn't exactly high. Generally they've brought in box office bucks,
but money doesn't equal quality – nor genuine purpose. The problem with remakes
remains thus: beloved icons of cinema history (some of them bonafide
franchises unto themselves, many of them within the horror genre) are
re-heated to simply trade on an established name. Cynical business sense in
abundance, but artistically and from a fan's perspective, it's frequently
devoid of true merit. Add to this the fact that we horror fans possess a
particularly potent brand of curiosity, a curiosity that convinces us to spend
money to see these remakes simply to see how they compare to the original
films, even though the result is typically that the original remains to be the
best. Remakes today almost never produce a greater film than the original.
A quick perusal of my DVD and Blu-Ray collection that's
weighing down my walls, reveals numerous examples of films that have been
remade, of films that are themselves remakes.
Some of these remakes are decent (or even pretty good),
but simply don't touch on the power and status of the original films. Night
of the Living Dead 1990, Halloween 2007, and The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 2003 are all examples of this level of the remake strata.
Far below that we have turgid and even quite cynical rehashes,
such as Dawn of the Dead 2004 (vapid, devoid of intelligence, all
mouth and no trousers), Day of the Dead 2008 (no, just no), The
Fog 2005 (again, no, just no), A Nightmare On Elm Street
2010 (a poorly paced and pale imitation of the film that gave life to
New Line Cinema, cobbled together from badly executed sequences pinched from
Craven's original), and The Thing 2011. The last one is technically
a “prequel” (and a pointless one at that as we know exactly what will
happen to the Norwegian camp), but it attempts to re-tread John Carpenter's
1982 footsteps so often (while completely ignoring the alien's modus
operandi in the process) that it's clearly a remake that wants to hide
inside an imitation.
Click "READ MORE" below for more remakes, and why Drive-In Massacre would be a worthwhile candidate for another going-over.
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