Top 5 Films that Should be Remade
Everybody’s been screaming about Hollywood remakes lately – and who can blame them. If it’s not a remake, it’s a re-imagining, a revamp, or just generally disappointing. It seems there’s nothing new under the sun (District 9 politely excepted), and that every beloved film from your past is vulnerable to being mauled by the current studio heads (for example – who would have thought that they’d (1) remake Look Who’s Coming to Dinner and (2) remake it as an Angry Black Man comedy?)
While vast amounts of virtual ink and vitriol has been expended to try convincing Hollywood to give up the remake, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s unavoidable – we’ve had remakes since the 1920′s, and all we can really do is hunker in and maybe try to nudge Hollywood towards films that should be remade. With that in mind… my list of ten films that Hollywood should consider churning out again, and why.
First off, what do I use as criteria? I don’t look at whether or not the film can be ‘improved’ by Hollywood – often, classic films are classic because there are elements that can’t be improved on, or can’t be recreated. You can’t get Roddy McDowall back. You can’t get Peter Lorre. You can’t get Boris Karloff or Vincent Price.
Instead, I look at the potential for new technology – and new social standards – to bring out elements of the original that were underplayed. Not downplayed – many films (like Jaws) benefit vastly from downplaying the FX. However, other films (like my #1 pick) have underplayed elements that really ought to be key – be that gore, sex, or social issues that simply weren’t acceptable to address in the original time frame.
With that in mind, let’s get this show on the road.
Brief Summary: Four people go into a haunted house, hoping to find proof of the supernatural for their wealthy patron. Over the course of a week, the central haunting force rips them apart, before concluding in a mass attack to destroy them all.
Why a Remake? Folks who know me will probably be picking their jaws up off the floor to see this one. I adore this film, as everybody knows. But I also adore the book, as I’ve admitted in my discussion of Hell House on this very blog. In the 70′s, the British film simply couldn’t play out all the gore and sexual elements of the novel, and a modern remake could get away with bringing up much more in the way of the elements that made the novel so horrifying. However, don’t focus entirely on the gore and sexuality – focus more on Mrs. Barrett, and her issues. That was, after all, the primary focus of the novel. Casting moves – I’d replace Roddy McDowall (God, that hurts to say, but it’s necessary – the man’s dead, and I have to accept that) with Robert Downey Jr. He’s got the potential to play the trouble character that Fischer really needs, and the quirky side that implies a trip through mental breakdown and alcoholism. Plus, giving him only a handful of big scenes would help keep him from overpowering the other characters too much.
4: The Shadow
Summary: Leading a small army of agents of people he’s helped, the Shadow fights crime with the power to cloud men’s minds….
Why a Remake? Because the original film, while enjoyable on a basic level if you quietly ignore the original source material, needs to be expunged from the memory of mankind and replaced with the real thing. Drop the origin story, put the Shadow in at his roughest – I recommend Crime Nation era. In the post-Batman Begins world, we can hopefully convince them to go with the original Shadow, who’d have been more at home with Bale’s Batman than with Clooney’s (rather more the model they went with, sadly.)
Summary: Not Night of the Demons, the singular. This film is a classic version of M.R. James’ Casting the Runes – read it, love it, watch it.
Why a Remake? Mostly to bring James’ work back into the public consciousness. The movie doesn’t need a remake, but it could be done pretty well, especially if you put in a director and screenwriter who can handle the slow burn tension of it all. Best of all, in a post-Omen, post-Final Destination world, there’s a chance that you could get away with going back to the original view of the monster, which raised the question of if it was actually a physical being, or if it was merely the gnawing terror of knowing you were doomed to die in 30 days that led to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2: The Beast with Five Fingers (Sadly unavailable on DVD)
Summary: In Victorian Italy, a one-handed pianist passes away, leaving his fortune to the young nurse he’s fallen in love with. His conniving family shows up, hoping to claim said fortune, and generally make themselves obnoxious, particularly to Hillary, the secretary played brilliantly by Peter Lorre. But when the people conspiring against our heroine start passing away, is it a human agent at play? Or has the iron-willed pianist come back, in the form of his one functioning hand, out to see that his wishes are fulfilled?
Why a Remake? Honestly, it hurts me to put this one on the list. However, the story hasn’t been seen in decades, and a remake would let us excise the horrible coda where the comic Italian policeman explains everything. More importantly though, a remake would just about force them to finally put the original out on DVD, so I can watch it at my leisure….
1: Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory
Summary: In a German reformatory school for delinquent girls, wolves seem to be attacking the girls… but does our wolf walk on two legs? If so, who is it – the school’s chief backer? His wife and her hounds? The mysterious new professor? Or perhaps our ersatz Peter Lorre groundskeeper?
Why a Remake? Come on, folks, doesn’t the title say it all? The original was a bloodless, tame German film that had the sensibilities of the 50′s. It begs to be remade with all the tacky CGI gore effects and T&A that can be crammed in, with all the lack of subtlety that Hollywood is so very, very good at these days. Would the result be any better than the original? Well, no, probably not (not that it has to aim very high to manage it). But that title, man! It begs to be made as a proper piece of exploitation crap, rather than merely pseudo-gothic Z-reel crap.
Hell House
“Isn’t it just another so-called haunted house?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t. It’s the Mount Everest of haunted houses.”
~~~===~~~
“Because I know the score! You do not fight this house! Hell House doesn’t mind a visitor or two… but if you try to do anything more, you’re a dead man! With a dead wife at your side!
“…He isn’t going to listen, is he?”
~~~===~~~
Hell House, and its associated movie, are two of my all-time horror favorites, and I’m going to spoil the Hell out of them both here (pun thoroughly intended.) The movie’s over 30 years old, the book older than that… so I think the statute of limitations on spoilers is thoroughly expired.
Hell House is, in my opinion, one of the finest haunted house stories of all time. Very similar to Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Matheson’s version is much more pulp-oriented, with a greater focus on horrific physical threats than Jackson’s book, which focuses strongly on the psychological.
The Basics:
The basic story of Hell House is as follows. Three people are hired by a very old, very wealthy man for a ridiculous sum in the 1970′s to establish the facts regarding life after death. To do so, they must investigate Hell House, “the Mount Everest of haunted houses.” And so, Dr. Barrett, a skeptic and parapsychologist, takes his wife Edith, mental medium Florence Tanner, and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer (the sole survivor of the last attempt to investigate the house) into the maelstrom.
The story is excellently paced, with no pretense at hiding the house’s reputation, or serious effort to conceal that there are supernatural (or supernormal, as Dr. Barrett calls them) events taking place. The real question is where these events are coming from – are they driven by Florence Tanner’s spiritual beliefs, as Dr. Barrett insists, or are they the result of haunting spirits, as Tanner believes?
Or, as Fischer believes, are they all the victims of the House’s malevolent presence?
The story becomes a roller coaster ride, with typical hauntings punctuated by attempts on the lives of various members of the expedition. Matheson’s writing makes it entirely believable throughout that everything could be Miss Tanner’s fault, without her realizing it. The beauty of it is that this mirrors the structure of The Haunting of Hill House, where the serious question is just how much of the ‘haunting’ is the result of troubled misfit Eleanor’s mental state.
Unfortunately for the guests of Hell House, there’s more than one troubled soul here. Barrett is blinded by science – so utterly convinced of his correctness that he absolutely ignores the possibility that somebody else could be right too. Further, he disregards the fact that his theories actually fall short of being scientific hypotheses – the way he structures them, the way he defends them, there is absolutely no way that he could be proven wrong, short of proving that there’s no such thing as the supernatural. That part is obvious… the question of surviving spirits, however, isn’t, and he won’t tolerate any serious suggestion that he’s mistaken about their existence (or lack thereof)… something he fails to correctly attribute to a backlash against his overzealous mother, rather than scientific conviction.
Florence Tanner has her own troubled background. A deeply religious woman, she’s as convinced in the righteousness of her faith as Barrett is in his. Overflowing with psychic talent, and the desire to use it to help spirits along, she willingly jumps into the whirlpool of power that is Hell House, and is ultimately consumed by it.
Edith, while not a psychic, is perhaps the most damaged of them all. Raised by a mother who hated her drunken, abusive, womanizing husband, nearly raped by the same man at an earlier age, Edith is a walking mass of neuroses. Earlier in her life, when her husband left her during a work trip, she very nearly tried to kill herself. Unfortunately, Dr. Barrett knows nothing about this… or maybe he’d have either given up the job, or had her hospitalized while they were at Hell House, rather than taking her to a place that can manipulate her so very well.
Finally, we have Fischer. Once just as bad as Florence (worse, by his own admission), he learned his lesson when he barely survived Hell House. He goes into the house almost completely shut off, fooling himself into believing that he could single-handedly unwrap the house’s plan… he differs from Tanner and Barrett only in that he realizes he’s a self-deluded fool before the House manages to kill him, which gives him the chance to come back and finish the job.
In the end, unlike in many horror novels, good triumphs ovber evil, albeit with heavy casualties. Fischer and Edith survive, laying the spirit of the house to rest, and taking their dead back to be buried. The group of them overcomes the greatest weakness they have – their inability to work together. They finally begin to put their individual pieces and strengths together, after two of them are dead, and defeat Belasco. But along the way… oh yes, along the way….
The original novel is by far more explicit and horrific than either the movie or the graphic novel. Of the three formats, only this one includes the inner thoughts of the characters that help us to get an insight into their flaws and weaknesses, the same sort of insight that allows Belasco to turn them against each other. And, unlike the movie, this includes all the twisted games that Belasco plays with Tanner and Edith. Belasco, a powerfully charismatic sadist with a taste for the corruption of innocent souls, attacks these two where they’re weakest. Tanner, with the memories of her brother’s death, and his final sorrows. Edith, with her somewhat warped views of sexuality as a fearful thing. Perhaps the greatest horror of Hell House is that its master so easily attacks the deepest, most intimate parts of a person’s identity – your core beliefs, your sexuality, your emotions, your very mind.
Interestingly, that very target is what proves to be Belasco’s undoing. Realizing that the one point that Belasco can be attacked on is his ego, Fischer hunts him down and begins ripping Belasco’s inflated ego to pieces, slowly destroying the spirit as they face each other. This scene exists in all versions, though in the movie it’s perhaps at its weakest (in writing, not in portrayal – more on that later.) If you don’t want to read it, then look for one of the audiobook versions, preferably unabridged – it’s about an eight-hour listen, but well worth it.
Of the three versions… this is the weakest. Ironically, it’s much closer to the novel than the movie, and has some nice visual touches (as a Lovecraft fan, I was particularly amused by the Cthulhoid face in the bottom of the pool in the overhead shot.) It covers all the major elements of the plot, and portrays the mental and phsyical degradation of the house’s occupants the best. Unfortunately, it edits out all of the interior parts that are so badly needed to understand everybody. While the movie does the same, you rather expect that of a film. A graphic novel could at least include the occasional reference… but it chooses not to. While just as explicit as the novel, it’s hamstrung by the fact that the novel is just as easy to read as the graphic novel… and, as such, can’t really be a full recommendation. That said, if you can’t bring yourself to read a full page, and you want to get the full version along with lesbian undertones, you could do worse… like watching the recent remake of The Haunting.
While the book is better, and the movie too focused on one particular element of Belasco’s ego, the movie is perhaps my favorite version… and it’s all because of Roddy McDowall. While McDowall can overact with the best of them, for most of the movie he underplays the tense, paranoid Fischer. Only as events begin to unravel, and Fischer begins to become unhinged, does McDowall take the brakes off and start letting out his energy. While most critics hate the ending of the movie, I think it’s my favorite version – McDowall’s delivery is perfect, and you never get the ridiculous feeling any of a thousand other actors might have provided when you watch them monologuing to an empty space and expecting it to answer back. While the movie is, at best, a heavily censored version of the original… it’s also a very, very good one, and I can’t recommend it highly enough to fans of the haunted house film.
