Why Remakes Suck
Once upon a time, Hollywood was called the Dream Factory, and aptly so. It took the dreams of writers and turned them into visual masterpieces, or at least entertaining romps. They took books and adapted them for the big screen. They created stunningly original brand new worlds and scenarios and stories to entertain us. And while there was a certain degree of copying going on, because nothing succeeds like success, the wink-wink nudge-nudge obvious rip-offs were generally relegated to B-movie status. Not anymore.
The trend started slowly, haltingly, giving us sci-fi and/or horror classics with a new coat of paint and better special effects, like the remake of The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They toyed with the idea of making new versions of classics, like (believe it or not) Casablanca, but thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and such obvious crimes against humanity were scrapped. Unfortunately, a few slipped through the cracks and so we had to suffer the indignities of absolute pieces of cinematic shit like Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot stupidity that was 1998’s Psycho, which was universally reviled and for which the filmmakers were heaped with scorn and derision. And yeah, okay, we got to see Anne Heche naked, but it didn’t matter. It was a dumb idea, and it was treated as such.
They toyed with the idea of making new versions of classics, like (believe it or not) Casablanca, but thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and such obvious crimes against humanity were scrapped.
Jeff Thomson
The stated reasoning behind the idea was to bring the classics forward to a brand new audience. And okay, I can understand that, because I have a deep and abiding love for some of those old movies. But here’s an idea: How about spending a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars spent creating pale imitations of the original on advertising instead, and then simply re-release the movies into the major theater chains? The Maltese Falcon, black and white though it maybe, still holds up, So does Lawrence of Arabia, the original War of the Worlds, or Journey to the Center of the Earth. These movies are classics for a reason. Which brings us to True Grit.
How about spending a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars spent creating pale imitations of the original on advertising instead, and then simply re-release the movies into the major theater chains?
Jeff Thomson
Why oh why did they feel the need to remake it? The obvious answer is money, which makes sense because, after all, entertainment is a business. But here’s the thing: you might put an eye patch on John Wayne, but you don’t put a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It just fine as is, thank you very much. Leave it the fuck alone. There are certain things you simply do not do, but Hollywood did it anyway.
This brings us to the trio of movies at the heart of my latest weekly diatribe, all of which were born from John W. Campbell’s pulp SciFi novella, Who Goes There? You might know it better by the name Hollywood gave it: The Thing.
The first installment was the 1951 classic The Thing from Another World, which took the basic premise (scientists at a remote research station find a crashed alien spacecraft buried in the ice, that they then accidently blow up, leaving them with nothing except the lone body of one of its occupants, frozen in a nearby block of ice) and then went its own way. Both the book and the other two versions of the story takes place in Antarctica, but they decided for the first movie to move it to other extreme and placed it at the North Pole, instead. They also added the air crew from an Air Force plane, a journalist in search of a story, and a few token females, then threw in James Arness in horror makeup as a sort of murderous carrot from space. I’m being facetious, but that’s essentially it and the result was an instant classic.
This brings us to my favorite horror movie of all time: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). I do not consider this a remake of the first one, precisely because of the differences between it and Howard Hawks’ version. They share the same source material and premise, but that’s about all. Carpenter, himself, loved the original enough to have it playing in the background of his breakaway slasher movie, Halloween. Justifiably so. He brought the story back to Antarctica and much more closely followed Who Goes There, with incredible practical effects created by a then rookie Rob Bottin. The creature is without a doubt the stuff nightmares are made of. It’s also, essentially, what was in the book. And like the book, there were no women in the cast, which was accurate because at the time there were hardly any women working on our southernmost continent. It also greatly played up the paranoia inherent in the book, and Carpenter turned it into a masterpiece.
It should have ended there. They should have left well enough alone. But nooooooooo. Hollywood just couldn’t resist, and I hate them for it.
Along comes the 2011 remake – only they thought they’d be sneaky and called it a prequel, instead. And here’s the thing (pun absolutely intended) had they actually told the story of what happened before MacReady and company were visited by the crazed Norwegians shooting at a dog from a helicopter, that might have been pretty cool, but they didn’t. Oh, they tried to tack on some bits and pieces of such a story, here and there, seemingly at random throughout the movie, but it couldn’t hide the fact that what they were really doing was remaking the same damned movie all over again, with shittier actors, a token female, and virtually shot-for-shot regurgitations of scenes from my favorite fucking horror movie of all fucking time. Those assholes!
Am I adequately conveying my disgust for what they’ve done? I hope so. And now, I’m headed to my livingroom to watch the real deal. Again. Why? Because it’s an awesome movie.
And they should have left well enough alone.
Until next time . . .
Jeff Thomson
A fourteen-year veteran of the USCG, Jeff Thomson served as a navigator on four different ships and as SAR Controller at two Group Operations Centers. He is currently retired from his life as an over-the-road truck driver, which was not the most conducive writing environment, and yet, he managed to write the majority of his first novel, a bit of his second, and a chunk of his third, using his steering wheel as a desk. He is now writing full time (on an actual desk), and currently working on the sixth novel in his Guardians of the Apocalypse series.
