Remakes-A good or a bad thing??



Hello Folks,
Another discussion between me and the good man Gav, Remakes Good or Bad?



A VIEW FROM JONNY T.

To me this is much as a yes and a no in the same vane as should films be banned? Now i have seen some terrible remakes but also some good ones, whether it's classed as a remake, reboot, re imagining it is all pretty much the same, now, my favourite film of ALL time is the original Dawn of the Dead and imagine my shock when me and Emma went to the cinema and saw in a magazine that they were remaking it, i think my initial response was "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" But i have to admit that the remake was pretty damn good, as maybe you do? As with a lot of remakes they do take the initial idea mainly and build upon it but seldom do they improve it, not long after the dawn remake came straight to video Day of the dead and that was truly awful, the only element i could see from the original was the fact that they were in an underground bunker but then again the only comparison between the Dawn of the Dead films is the mall right?So that just goes to show you can take the source material and make it bad or terrible.
Same goes for me with remakes such as Friday 13th and Nightmare on Elm street, i just take them for what they are and i do of course love a bit of Jason and Freddy but have never been invested that much into the films to get annoyed by he shouldn't do that and that's wrong, but that's just my opinion.
The thing with the remakes is that it has been around and will be for the life of cinema as far as i can see, Frankenstein remade loads, Dracula remade loads and just look at the classic story of The last man on earth that went on to Omega Man, I am legend etc, all good films in their own right.
Now where do you stop? What films do you think should not be remade or should indeed be remade?
I can think of a few that i think would be good as a remake such as, who can kill a child? or maybe The living dead at Manchester morgue?
I personally would much rather see a good remake, well done than another Scream Movie or the such like,
But then again that's just my opinion,Whats yours?
Jonny T



A VIEW FROM BIG MAN GAV.

Remakes

The remake, the corner stone of unoriginal film making. Film studios love them; film fans hate them yet a large proportion of the cinema going public still line up in droves to spend their hard earned cash on watching them. This week Jonny’s cult films discuss the fine art of the rehash and ask ourselves do we really need remakes?

Aaargh, if ever there was a word to strike horror in the hearts of right minded film fans it has to be ‘remake’. The idea of somebody taking something that you love and then stripping it back to basics, adding bits, changing the overall message or filling it with appalling CGI in a shiny package for a new generation of fuckwits just fills me with dread. It’s very rare that a remake will offer anything new and it even rarer that it will better the original. I’ll admit that on occasions there are some decent ones. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an okay ‘reboot’ marred by a chronic prequel a few years later. In 2004 Zak Snyder gave us his impressive Dawn of the dead and apart from a shit CGI zombie baby I thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course it will never deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as... I did like Rob Zombies Halloween re-imagining, The Crazies and Friday the 13^th was okay, albeit soulless. And then there are the bad ones. Jeez, where do you start? I think Steve Miner’s Day of the dead deserves a special mention. The recent Nightmare on Elm Street made me want to fall asleep. The Wicker man, Planet of the apes, The Invasion, The Omen, Get Carter, The Jackal, etc. Oh, and what was Gus Van Sant thinking by simply re shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho frame by frame?!

So why does the world need remakes? Well, I don’t think we do unless the original idea was good but poorly implemented. I think Hollywood needs them to ‘balance the books’ so to speak. Regardless of the quality of the movie nothing brings in the punters better than familiarity and since the script and characters etc are already defined they can be quite cheap and quick to make. Of course, I am open to the suggestion that I’m getting old and I am starting to use the phrase ‘they don’t make them like they used to’ more and more. Maybe it’s time for this old fart to move over and let the fuckwits, sorry I mean the youth of today, have their turn...

Okay, I did have a go at finding good examples of remakes that I think managed to surpass the original. Here’s a few that I could think of with a little help from Google of course!

‘Ocean’s 11’ (2001)

John Carpenters ‘The Thing’ (1982)

‘Scarface’ (1983)

‘The Fly’ (1986)

‘War of the Worlds’ (2005)

‘The Departed’ (2006)

‘Invasion of the body snatchers’ (1978)