Remakes: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Hollywood has never shied away from remaking films. For me, this is mostly blasphemy. Coming down the pike in the near future are planned remakes of: Forbidden Planet, Soylent Green and The Fly. Why, I ask? Why do remakes? Usually the original is a great film (take note of the recent tepid remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, which I will return to), which certainly doesn’t need a be remade.

I understand that Hollywood lives to make money, but most remakes are money-losers, at least until they sell the DVD’s and Pay Per View rights. Most of the recent spate of remakes (I’m concentrating on the Science Fictions ones here, since I don’t want this article to end up four hundred pages long!), have been genre films, specifically Science Fiction. So let’s take a look at what I’m calling, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Part of the reason that Hollywood does remakes is that some of the originals were done in Black and White, which today’s audiences can’t, for some foolish reason, tolerate. I find this amazing. B&W is beautiful. The cinematography, the costumes, the settings, are all made to be in b/w. When the colorization fad came through, I didn’t see one film I thought worth seeing in color, especially not King Kong, which looked faded and drawn as if filmed through a vomit colored lens.

Another reason Hollywood will front a remake is to make money. They figure if they can draw in the original crowd, then add more pizzazz, they’ll get the new crowd too. Go check the internet and see how this plan has worked. A lot of remakes fail to make money again, until their rights are sold. Today really no movie really stays in the red with DVD and TV sales.

So let’s start with the GOOD.

In 1958, Steve McQueen starred in a little movie called the Blob. Fun and with a very original monster (Caltiki the Immortal Monster was of a similar vein), a blob that slithered around, eating anything organic (mostly humans). A sequel, which I won’t go into here, came out in the 70’s, but in 1988, the remake, which kept the general premise of a creature from space (but gave it a more sinister origin) came out. It was tremendous. Without insulting the original, this blob shot out tendrils and basically (and gorily) ate everything in it’s past. A thrilling ride, this is a sequel that lives up to the original, without being dismissive of it.

1951’s The Thing, was one of the first alien invasion movies. Taken from the late, great John W. Campbell’s novella, “Who Goes There?” while the story was watered down, this is still a taut, great monster movie. In 1981, John Carpenters version, much darker and more faithful to the original, hit theaters. With SFX by Rob (Robocop, The Howling, Legend to name a few) Bottin, and a monster that was terrifying, this is a great remake. It keeps the story premise of an alien whose very DNA is the invader intact, while keeping eyes glued to the screen as it changes and mutates. I enjoy both equally  and usually watch them back to back.

The last of the good (for this article, anyhow) remakes I’ll cover is The Fly. The original 50’s movie is fun, but it’s really just drive-in fodder. When I was about 8 and saw this the first time, rather than get frightened, I laughed. How did the heads change size? I’m sure I wasn’t the only Famous Monster, Monster Times, Castle of Frankenstein reading kid who though this, either. Still, it takes itself seriously and is a fun movie to watch. The remake, by David Cronenberg is however, brilliant. Using the idea that the scientists DNA has fused with Fly DNA is terrifying as is the final creature. What really makes this movie work is that the two leads, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum have real chemistry and their off screen romance translates into the on screen one.

Now we’ll come to the BAD and the UGLY. Remakes that shouldn’t have gotten made because they fall short of being worthy of their audience, and remakes that are just terrible movies. King Kong comes instantly to mind. DeLaurentis version is just a mess. The giant ape robot is unconvincing (Kong was mostly played by Rick Baker, make up artist extraordinaire), the acting (hard to believe that Jessica Lange became so good) terrible and the story itself, pale in compare to the original. This long, drawn out, boring film is an insult to the original and falls into the UGLY category. And yet, it spawned a sequel! No accounting for taste, eh? Peter Jackson’s remake, while beautiful to look at, is far too long and has too many unneeded subplots. It takes as long for the cast to get to skull island as the original film. And there’s an EXTENDED version. Now I am a fan of PJ’s Lord of the Rings, but they had to be long, King Kong didn’t, so I drop his version into the bad category, because of this need it seemed, to be bigger than the original (and still, King) film.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson is one of the greatest vampire novels of all time. Influencing Stephen King to write Salem’s Lot, it’s now been made three times. The first, by an Italian production company after Hammer films passed, is (in English) The Last Man On Earth. Low budget, with a great Vincent Price as Robert Morgan (Neville in the book), this is the most faithful to the book. B/W, showing how dreary Morgan’s live is among the vampire who were once his friends and neighbors, I think this is a worthy adaptation, that makes me wonder, what would Hammer’s version have looked like? The second version, done in the 70’s, is The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. I enjoy this version as well, which drops the Vampire angle in favor of biological Luddite Mutants hunting down ex Air Force Colonel Neville, who thanks to a vaccine, is immune to the virus that has wiped out most of humanity. Drawing on then current fears of biological warfare, with a great score by Ron (Doctor Who) Grainer, this is also worth seeing. The most recent remake, I Am Legend (a prequel is rumored) with Will Smith, missed the boat entirely. Costing 100 million plus, it makes the infected humans poorly executed CGI zombies, giving them no personality. A mish-mosh of the book and the Omega Man (both are credited) it seems to have been influenced as well by 28 Days Later and 30 Days of Night, since the creatures in it are mostly bestial. The screenwriters missed the whole point of the book. There is no hope for humanity in I Am Legend, we are done and a new race is inheriting the Earth.

The last two films I’ll cover are both squarely in the Ugly category. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (there are two others, but both, being beneath contempt, are being left off. Readers should watch at their own risk.) shows little originality, lifting ideas from the original, superior film (force fields) and scenes from the book (the ferry getting knocked over, the tentacles from the tripods, the tripods themselves. But there are so many outright stupid ideas in this movie! Why did the aliens hide their machines within the earth? How did they travel here on lightning bolts and why? Is humanity a threat to them? If so, why not just wipe us out back when we were wearing furs and using flint weapons? I’ll be honest here, I hate this movie. I’ve never watched it again and I never will. Not nice of me to put such vitriol in this article, but I have to be honest. This is a terrible movie. I still can’t understand how it made a ton of money. Truly an ugly, ugly remake. I’ll watch the George Pal version every time it’s on (and I own the DVD!), but I wouldn’t care if the Luddite from The Omega Man, came and got this movie.

The last film I’ll cover is the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. I’ve been watching the original since I was about four years old, when my father (who introduced me to Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy) sat me down to watch it with him. I’ve been enthralled ever since. It’s one of the best Science Fiction films, as well as warning films, ever made. It’s also way ahead of its time. The remake is simply an excuse for the Green Party to make a movie. Oh, aliens have come here to wipe us out because we’re messing up the planet. Who made these guys God? Kind of kills the UFOites idea that one day aliens will come down and help us out eh? They don’t even give us a chance! The movie isn’t helped by overblown SFX, such as Gort becoming anything destroying locusts, or Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly sleep walking through their roles. Just a bland, overdone remake of a classic.

So where does this leave us? At least in my opinion, most remakes are worthless. There are thousands of Science Fiction novels out there, Foundation, Ringworld, Tunnel in The Sky, The Caves of Steel, Legacy of Heroet, to name just a few, that scream to be made into movies. But Hollywood is frightened. For every great, original film like District 9, there are terrible movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 2007 Day of the Dead and more coming down the pike. Will it ever stop? Not likely. Not as long as the drones of Hollywood feel that there is an audience for these. All we can do is cross our fingers and hope that at least once in a while, one executive will have the brain power to green light something like James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar. Until then, ‘Keep watching the skies!”

-- Robert Morganbesser