This can be a fun pastime for a while but there’s only so much abuse your teeth can take. And you’ll find if you do that, karma will come around to get you because one day someone will come up to you and say “Hey, I hear they’re making a remake of (insert the title of your favorite movie here)! Whatdaya think?”, and you’ll be forced to respond and, while the punching of the perpetrator will be fun, that joy will be short-lived.

Meanwhile deep inside you, a dark demon known as “Hollywood Resentment” will grow inside you, slowly consuming your very soul as the day grows nearer to the release of the remake. You’ll ostracize yourself from society, only leaving the house to bulk buy cat food for your increasingly sized family of feral felines, in hope that the world will forget about you and you’ll never need to hear anything of the dreaded remake again, but it will only work for so long. These days DVD’s can be delivered right to your door and much as it will pain you deeply, you won’t be able to resist the curiosity… and on that day, you will die a terrible, terrible death.

And the cats will eat your head.

That is unless you accept the fact that remakes aren’t all bad. In fact, perhaps even in most cases, there can be some greatness that can flow from them.

No, wait, put away your pitchforks and torches for a minute and hear me out! While it’s true that remakes can often-times be unnecessary, meaningless, poorly directed and… well, really shitty, that doesn’t mean that they’re all bad. To illustrate a point (that’s arguably not worth making) I think one would have to look at the individual movie and, while I’m not going to attempt to even scratch the surface of the amount of remakes out there (That would take me about ten years, by which time there would be another decade’s worth of remakes created) that’s exactly what I’m going to do… starting with:

The Fly (1986)

The Fly is one of those oddities in cinema that, along with “The Thing” has vastly out shadowed its original version and become the definitive. An accomplishment not to be scoffed at! Probably vastly to do with both movies having excellent and well respected directors, not two-bit ex-music video producers that seem to be all the rage these days… The Fly did what every good remake should aspire to do and that is to take a film with outdated effects, acting or cinematography and give it the do-over that it so deserved and that was impossible to give it when it was first released, thus giving the audience a perspective of the film that the original film-makers would be proud of.

Because of The Fly being such a definitive reworking of the 1958 version it’s completely illegal to make a claim that you “don’t mind remakes” based on your enjoyment of it. If you make such a ridiculous claim you are immediately locked away and forced to watch the “Day of the Dead” remake over and over again until you gouge out your own eyeballs.

And the same is true for…

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Who gives a flying monkey’s ball-sack about the original Little Shop of Horrors? Many people don’t even know it exists! The original, in case you’re living your life in blissful ignorance, was a zero-budget film, created in just two days. It created a cult following (Because people are morons) and later became a stage musical and in turn became remade into a larger budget, all singing all dancing musical which, at the time, probably seemed ridiculous. And well, it was!

Little Shop Of Horrors took a small-time cult-followed film created on a whim, trampled all over it, added a bunch of ridiculous songs, a few explosions, comedian cameos and a huge dose of other things that, if they were being done to your favorite movie you’d most likely sob yourself to sleep for the next few weeks over. But somehow, Little Shop of Horrors pulls it off and we should all graciously bow before The Little Shop of Horrors. The king of all remakes involving large talking plants.

While many remakes take the route of drastically fucking with the original film-makers idea and turning it into something new, others decide to keep the film practically identical to the original. Films such as…

Funny Games (2007)

To be honest, maybe I’m not the best person to speak to about the Funny Games remake. Why? I haven’t seen it. Why bother? The film is an exact scene-for-scene, line-for-line remake of the original version which was released only a decade before it. Yes, the original was made in Austria but if you can’t be bothered to read subtitles/listen to dubbing that’s your problem and some fucktard in Hollywood shouldn’t need to shell out millions of dollars making a movie that was only half-way decent in the first place for your lazy ass!

Those millions of dollars could be put to far better use. For example, we could use it to line the pockets of one of Hollywood’s most gifted directors, Michael Bay. (That was sarcasm, you can stop screaming)


Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was gritty, raw, graphic and horrifying to many. Personally, I didn’t like it but that’s my choice. I just couldn’t get into it, it didn’t really scare me or disgust me like I felt it should and since it had been built up in my head (What young person won’t have seen many copy-cat chainsaw wielding maniacs on T.V. and film countless times before they see the original Leatherface?) I also felt disappointed at the lack of a killer that was “likable” in any way. I know that wasn’t the point in it, I’m just hypothesizing as to why I couldn’t get into it… So, and I know there are hordes of people out there who will want to destroy me for saying it, it’s because of this that I preferred the 2003 remake.

Excuse me while I type the rest of this article from a reinforced bomb-shelter.

I think Hollywood was allowed one “modernized” version of a killer we all knew and loved already though. Just one, just to give those young’uns something to get into that they didn’t have a chance to first time round.

One chance, Hollywood. That means there’s no excuse for…

Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday The 13th (2009/2010)

I don’t even need to get into these ones really. Frankly, if we’re to compare them to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s very important to note the years the originals were made. Not only were they still making Freddy and Jason films as recently as 2003 (2001 if you don’t count Freddy Vs. Jason), but the originals are recent enough that, unlike TCM, the filming, effects and acting aren’t dated.

You can still watch Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th today and get the same experience from it that you would have way back when.

I don’t include the Child’s Play remake in this section only because they have the amazing foresight to know that getting the original actor who played the killer is essential if you’re going to in any way please the fans of the original.

And not casting Billy Bob Thornton instead.

Moving on before I get all pissed off…

Disturbia (2007)

I’m only including this in this list of remakes because it is quite clearly a remake of Rear Window despite what Steven Spielberg might have you believe.








Halloween (2007)

Yet another opinion I have that may make me unpopular among readers of this article is that the Halloween remake by Rob Zombie wasn’t bad.

The horror!

Let me be clear though that, unlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I didn’t enjoy it more than the original. Not by a long shot but here’s the reason to not completely hate it.

You see, leading up to its release horror fans the world over were getting ready to have one big mass spontaneous and collaborative vomit fest. The world would drown in the spew of a billion Halloweenies. The obvious reason was that no-one should even touch such a cinematic classic! And I was with them all the way! Until I saw it… and while I wasn’t blown away I was taken in by the fact that Rob Zombie didn’t try and remake the old film… he seemed to have a different idea about retelling the story from a completely different perspective and creating a “new” Michael Myers, which I think he did very well. And therefore I feel, in spite of the ever-growing sound of the lynch mob getting closer and closer, that Halloween was not a complete waste of 2 hours.

I don’t have a witty line to connect this film with the next, so let’s just move on to…

House of Wax (2005)

If someone yells at you for saying you enjoyed the 2005 remake of House of Wax because they can’t stand all these remakes Hollywood is churning out these days slap them upside the head. Better still - hit them across the face with a plank of wood. With a nail in it.

You see the “original” House of Wax was a remake itself. It became the definitive version and then was remade into the House of Wax starring Paris Hilton which… well, it kind of sucked.

As a film it sucked.

As a remake it did a decent job because it took elements from the original version but turned it into a new story giving audiences, even those who had seen the “original”, something new to watch.

In many ways, it wasn’t much of a remake at all but more a big homage to the 1953 version… much like…

Dawn of the Dead (2003)

The new version of Dawn of the Dead was originally written as a different movie; A movie with no connection to George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead at all, besides being a zombie film and maybe having a few references in the story.

The events that happen in the remake are very dissimilar to the events in the original, besides them being in a mall at one point and a few lines of dialogue being similar but in this same respect, countless other Zombie films could have been considered “remakes”, had the title been different.

It seems to me that some production company somewhere just thought the film would sell better as a remake than as a standalone movie and they were probably right. If you don’t like this film because it’s a blasphemy against the original then I ask you to watch it and pretend it’s called “Zombie Splat Gore!” or something and I think you’ll find it’s a pretty reasonable (if not, awesome!) movie.

If you didn’t like the film because it had “running zombie” then I suggest you fuck off and watch Return Of The Living Dead (from which most zombie stereotypes, like eating brains, became popular from) and get back to me.

Speaking of brainless…

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (????)

This little gem is still in the “rumor” stage and I hope to God it stays there. The only thing worse than the fact that anyone would attempt to remake this true classic is that it’s MTV who are apparently doing so.

Were they not content on destroying music and had to turn to classic cinema too?

Anyway, fuck them, and let’s move on to the final film I’m going to blab on about and what I consider to be the perfect example of a remake…


The Grudge (2004)

American remakes of Asian horror films are among the most detestable of all remakes. They are, in fact, a loathsome subspecies of remake that even the regular remake would look down on and spit. They come out seemingly split-seconds after the original is released (pointless), they follow the plot of the original without adding a God-damned thing (Except maybe a horse flying off a boat. WTF?) and they’re usually so over simplified that you might as well be watching a T.V. movie on Lifestyle.

The great thing about Asian horror is that they’re from Asia. Any film made in a different culture tends to follow different styles of storytelling and filmmaking than ours and that makes them more interesting to watch. This is true for any foreign films and the further a culture is from our own, the more interesting and intense that feeling can be! So, for the most part, Asian horror tends to be a welcome breath of change when one seeks it out.

Unfortunately this means plots are sometimes a little hard to follow. No problem there, the films are still enjoyable and it just means they make you think a little bit more (Good God! “Think?!”)! But tell that to Hollywood and they’ll bring out Shia LeDouche, a director from MTV and a budget of 50 gazillion dollars to fund a complete remake which becomes this completely bland, under acted bullshit that we’re so used to seeing.

Sometimes they put Japanese people in the remake to make it authentic! Go team U.S.A!

“But you said The Grudge was the greatest remake of all?!!?”, I hear you cry out

And that’s possibly because by its very nature, it being an American remake of a film that was less than a decade old, it should have been awful. However, whoever first decided to remake The Grudge had the amazing foresight to get the original director, Takashi Shimizu, to direct the remake. The result is a film which is not simply retelling the story over again, but adding elements to it. There are parts of the story told in The Grudge which are basically filling up holes that existed in the plot of the original. Perhaps these were holes that didn’t need to be filled but they were executed without the obnoxiousness of being forced into someone else’s story, since the story was being told by the original writer. It also managed to simplify the movie so your average loser on the street could understand it without over-simplifying it so the film wasn’t interesting.

Yes, you can argue with me all day about whether or not The Grudge was a good movie. Personally I think it’s reasonable. But whether it’s a good remake should not be open for discussion. Need I threaten you with the “Day of the Dead” remake again?

On that bombshell, I’d like to close by saying simply, no matter how bad a remake is; at least it’s not a god-damned “prequel”.