first BATTLE ROYALE... one of my all time favorite movies. I can undertand why they remake that, as there are certain japanese cultural things in it which make it hard for Westerners to understand.. still I doubt it will be any good... so far they promise to push the r-rating to its limits, but I can see a PG-13 version on the horizon... a truly clever filmmaker like David Fincher could make hell of a movie out of it, but with Neal H. Moritz as the producer I see Kelly Clarkson starring in it... oh my...
other remake: THE STEPFATHER... well, is there anything left form the 80ies in the horror genre? I love the original... don't know how to improve on that? Not even on the score, which was really bad in the original, but I guess they will call James Dooley again for something like that. His WHEN A STRANGER CALLS score is really beyond belief... hardly heard anything that bad.
even more remakes coming this way
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Carlson2005
what's malefique?
well, even if once in a while they may want to remake something which wouldn't hurt to be remade (or nobody knows), they rarely showed so far that they know how to improve on a bad movie. It seems like they only go for the marketing of the name and hope that drives people into the theaters.
But hey, even Scorsese does a remake of INFERNAL AFFAIRS (and I heard it is an almost shot for shot remake)... so if even one of the bests out there has no own idea anymore... what do we expect???
The only remake I really want to see is THE BLOB, though that seems caught in development-limbo... though I hope it's not PG-13 if it ever gets made... there are so many cool ways to make this really interesting, but well...
well, even if once in a while they may want to remake something which wouldn't hurt to be remade (or nobody knows), they rarely showed so far that they know how to improve on a bad movie. It seems like they only go for the marketing of the name and hope that drives people into the theaters.
But hey, even Scorsese does a remake of INFERNAL AFFAIRS (and I heard it is an almost shot for shot remake)... so if even one of the bests out there has no own idea anymore... what do we expect???
The only remake I really want to see is THE BLOB, though that seems caught in development-limbo... though I hope it's not PG-13 if it ever gets made... there are so many cool ways to make this really interesting, but well...
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Carlson2005
The Departed is quite different in many ways from Infernal Affairs if it's anything like the script I've read - much simplified (the screenwriter describes the first film as too complicated for American audiences, when it's the third that is the only one that really gets - intentionally - confusing) and with more showy rokles for the supporting cast. My hopes are low. I doubt it'll bev shot for shot since Scorsese claims not to have seen any of the films before shooting it, though in this case it might have been a good idea if he did.
As for Malefique and One Missed Call...
French horror films are a real rarity, but Malefique throws in one image that would leave David Cronenberg green with envy and which would have thrown Britain’s notoriously puritanical and scissor-happy censor James Ferman (not to mention the MPAA) running for the shears: as one of its quartet of convicts looks at a montage of body parts cut from porno mags and pasted to the wall, one of them turns into a real vagina with a blinking eye. That should tell you straight off if this film is for you or not, as does the opening moment of do-it-yourself open-heart surgery. In truth, it sounds more graphic on paper than in execution, with director and Woody Allen lookalike Eric Valette using the early gore the way Cronenberg used the exploding head in Scanners to create a sense of unease about what he’ll come up with to top it. The answer, in terms of gore, is not very much at all, but there are some interesting plot twists and plenty of atmosphere en route. It’s a good example of an imaginative low-budget film, set almost entirely in one (admittedly roomy) prison cell where the four inhabitants find a mysterious book that seems to offer a way out of jail if they can decipher its formulas and incantations. The only problem: they don’t ask why, if its previous owner truly escaped, the book was left behind or, indeed, where the book will take them…
In many ways it’s an old fashioned film, relying heavily on performances and characterization for much of the first half of the tight running time. Luckily the vaguely familiar cast bring more to their parts than is often the case in no-budget genre films, although it’ll be interesting to see how the original characters fare in the planned Hollywood remake (Valette himself is scheduled to remake Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call). Somehow I don’t think the transsexual rapist is likely to make the transition intact…
One Missed Call is Takeshi Miike’s Ringu/Phone ripoff, and a surprisingly low-key and tasteful (by Miike’s standards) one it is too. It’s also too long and suffers from an ending that’s a little ambiguous in the “What’s that all about, then?” way, and it seems a little awkward to have a major plot point revolve around Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy now that the condition has been widely repudiated as the invention of a vindictive misogynist who gets his jollies from giving false evidence in cot death cases. The plot involves a vengeful spirit that finds its next victims from the memory of the latest victims mobile phones, sending them a message from the future offering their last words, and the plot developments are pretty much as you’d expect. There are minor frissons in the death scenes, and there’s a neat setpiece where a live Geraldo Rivera style show centered on the next victim’s last few minutes goes spectacularly pear shaped, but it’s also overlong and the execution is often a little too clinical for the material. Minor Miike, but once it builds up a head of steam it’s an okay potboiler. This one could be imprved by tighter scripting, but I'm pretrty sure the Buddhist exorcism won't make the new version!
As for Malefique and One Missed Call...
French horror films are a real rarity, but Malefique throws in one image that would leave David Cronenberg green with envy and which would have thrown Britain’s notoriously puritanical and scissor-happy censor James Ferman (not to mention the MPAA) running for the shears: as one of its quartet of convicts looks at a montage of body parts cut from porno mags and pasted to the wall, one of them turns into a real vagina with a blinking eye. That should tell you straight off if this film is for you or not, as does the opening moment of do-it-yourself open-heart surgery. In truth, it sounds more graphic on paper than in execution, with director and Woody Allen lookalike Eric Valette using the early gore the way Cronenberg used the exploding head in Scanners to create a sense of unease about what he’ll come up with to top it. The answer, in terms of gore, is not very much at all, but there are some interesting plot twists and plenty of atmosphere en route. It’s a good example of an imaginative low-budget film, set almost entirely in one (admittedly roomy) prison cell where the four inhabitants find a mysterious book that seems to offer a way out of jail if they can decipher its formulas and incantations. The only problem: they don’t ask why, if its previous owner truly escaped, the book was left behind or, indeed, where the book will take them…
In many ways it’s an old fashioned film, relying heavily on performances and characterization for much of the first half of the tight running time. Luckily the vaguely familiar cast bring more to their parts than is often the case in no-budget genre films, although it’ll be interesting to see how the original characters fare in the planned Hollywood remake (Valette himself is scheduled to remake Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call). Somehow I don’t think the transsexual rapist is likely to make the transition intact…
One Missed Call is Takeshi Miike’s Ringu/Phone ripoff, and a surprisingly low-key and tasteful (by Miike’s standards) one it is too. It’s also too long and suffers from an ending that’s a little ambiguous in the “What’s that all about, then?” way, and it seems a little awkward to have a major plot point revolve around Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy now that the condition has been widely repudiated as the invention of a vindictive misogynist who gets his jollies from giving false evidence in cot death cases. The plot involves a vengeful spirit that finds its next victims from the memory of the latest victims mobile phones, sending them a message from the future offering their last words, and the plot developments are pretty much as you’d expect. There are minor frissons in the death scenes, and there’s a neat setpiece where a live Geraldo Rivera style show centered on the next victim’s last few minutes goes spectacularly pear shaped, but it’s also overlong and the execution is often a little too clinical for the material. Minor Miike, but once it builds up a head of steam it’s an okay potboiler. This one could be imprved by tighter scripting, but I'm pretrty sure the Buddhist exorcism won't make the new version!