Holy toledo, I’ve had some time off work lately and it’s been fantastic. There is so much stuff I’d rather be doing than working, it’s incredibly rare that I’m ever bored. Yesterday I finished the stuff I wanted to do and still had much of the day left so I went and hung out with the animals in the yard for a while, which doesn’t sound like much but it’s actually very restorative. It’s nice to spend time with gentle, friendly creatures that appreciate some rubs and scratches. Then I noticed our “lawn” (I use the term loosely, it’s more a collection of rocks, potholes, and a wide variety of weeds) was getting out of hand so I brought Kup the Lawnmower out and tamed that shit. FYI for his fan club, Kup is doing just fine. His blade bearing made a little bit of noise but wasn’t too bad. I used to hate mowing the lawn because it reminded me of when my dad used to make me do it but after having my own lawn for about 12 years now, I finally feel like doing it for myself, and it’s actually pretty satisfying. Then I still had some time left before dinner so I *gasp* made a salad to go with it. It’s funny that I recently made that post about how much I hate cooking because I’ve actually been doing a little bit of it since then, just because I’ve had the time for it lately, and I haven’t minded it. I wonder what else I would enjoy more if I had more free time.
This is all just an extremely verbose way of saying that I’m really grateful to have the time to, along with all the things I just mentioned, blog in morning. I was just chatting with a friend about horror movie remakes and reboots, and I think I want to dive into that. I’m dang lucky to have the luxury to spend a lazy morning doing this.
I said to my friend that I was generally not a fan of remakes — of course there’s an occasional great one (like Cronenberg’s The Fly or Carpenter’s The Thing) but I think they tend to be artless cash grabs. There has been an absolute torrent of them in the last 15 years, and a lot of those are remakes of films that came out just a few years prior. When a flick seems like a real piece of shit that no one involved with feels passionately about, and when it’s an obscure horror film that isn’t likely to make as much as it cost to create, I can’t help but wonder what the point of that flick is — if it’s not for the money, and not for the art, why is anyone doing it? Busy work, adding (mediocre) credentials to resumes? That’s all I can think of.
Anyway, my friend replied that cinema is a business so they can’t find fault with the cash grab aspect, that they find remakes are as good or bad as the filmmaker makes it, and this applies to film adaptations of popular books too.
At first I thought my friend was right on all fronts but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I agree. All art involves business at some point but that doesn’t excuse all the disposable art of the world. If I had the choice between hanging something special and cool on my walls, or a soulless generic print of sunflowers I bought at Walmart for $7, it would only make sense to go with the former. Of course it can be argued that for some weird and rare dickheads, the $7 sunflower print speaks to them and they truly love it, but let’s remember that those people are the exception, that for 99.9% of people, the Walmart sunflower print is just something cheap and easy to fill wall space…just like shitty remakes of films that only came out five years prior are something cheap and easy to waste time with. And I have a problem with wasting time on garbage. Our time here is finite, I don’t want to spend it on junk that stinks.
I agree with my friend’s second point, that remakes and reboots are only as good or bad as the creator makes it. A remake can be awesome if the people behind it love it and are willing to put the work into it — this is not unique to remakes too, it applies to all films, and all art in general too. However, I’ve yet to see this occur with one of the immediate remakes I’m more or less condemning here.
As far as film adaptations of books go, I think that it’s a little different from remaking a film because books describe things but words are a lot less concrete and allow for broader interpretation — the reader uses those words to imagine the scene being described, whereas film gives the viewer the entire scene, as imagined by someone else. By virtue of translating from one medium to another, it’s inherent that some things will change in translation. I think that’s a good thing, it makes it more likely for the artist to make the film their own, to really put their personal stamp on it. I don’t mind films being remade decades apart because they are likely then to be different due to a variety of changes in fashion, technology, film trends, etc but these immediate remakes end up so similar to the original that they feel like a perfect exercise in redundancy to me.
I’m glad I thought this over. It can be easy sometimes to be swayed by someone else’s opinion but gosh doodle, if ya just give something a few minutes thought you sometimes realize that yup, you’re still the same stubborn self-important prick you’ve always been.
I grew up seeing the VHS box for this at the video store. I found the image scary but in a weird, inexplicable way — it wasn’t one of the ones I was drawn to, but the cover definitely made an impression on me. When I finally saw it as an adult, I was absolutely blown away. I couldn’t believe I had been missing out on it until that point. Ben thought the special effects were cheesy so I chopped him up and threw his remains in a ditch.
crimson highway 