American Cinema and BASF
Do you remember those commercials that BASF (is this company still around ?) used to do? The tagline was always something to the effect of “We don’t make the products you use, we make the products you use better.” This is starting to apply to American Cinema. “We don’t make the movies you watch, we make the movies you watch better.” The “better” being subject to opinion of course. I”m talking about this rash of remakes flooding the movie theatres recently. Especially centering around the horror genre. At first I was excited, I mean, there’s horror movies in the theatres, that’s all I need - remakes or no. But it’s gotten way out of hand at this point.
First, many have probably heard about the Spielberg/Cruise “modern re-telling” of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. What many may not know is that at the same time, another director is making a lower budget version of the movie which he says stays truer to the original work. So we get two versions of the same movie in theatres on or about the same time. You can read more about this here
Second is the, atrocity that is the “Evil Dead” remake. Evil Dead is the movie I cut my horror teeth on. It represents my transcendence from someone who likes horror, to a true horror fan. A lotta love goes out to this movie from the entire horror community and no true horror fan would list this movie any lower than 3 on his or her list of Top Horror Movies Ever Made. But now it has been tainted by the remake. No one seems to care about all this except the horror fans. I wonder if it’s because it is horror and the genre has never truly been taken seriously. I wonder what would happen if a remake of, say, Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Wizard of OZ? Would people get fed up? I thought the remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory would be enough to make people sick of remakes.
Tara on 
stephanie on 
Carleen on 
December 23rd, 2004 at 06:41:10
What are you doing up so early?