by Stephen Davies

Created on: July 03, 2007

It is no surprise to most movie goers that the age of remakes is upon us. And wow, is it flourishing Those of us who enjoyed movies like The Wicker Man' and Texas Chainsaw Massacre' may have already trembled. Though, it refused to quit there with a remake of The Omen', shock, horror, awe and errmwhy?! This awful barrage has recently caused me to cringe and squirm at the incessant surge of Hollywood producers seeking alternative means to finding their next blockbuster. There is some kind of mass remake culture occurring under their pens. A kind of arrogance exists purporting that its okay to basically plagiarize a movie, note I find the word rewrite' quite difficult to use. The latest groundbreaking method is to find a great movie like The Hitcher', and coat it with dusty ideas professing to be an update for the audience of today. The bin should have been the fate of some of the latest rehashes to emerge from the grips of Hollywood Remake Horror.

It seems that many producers have taken on board the old adage that There is no new thing under the sun' quite literally. How did this nightmare begin?

It may have started when some hot shot distributor realised that there are not enough great original scripts being passed through their doors and complained. Could there have transpired a realisation that cinemas are just too empty during the year? Or maybe there has been a spate of great movies that no one could care less for.most likely reason possibly? Did you really need to know about Johnny Cash in Walk the Line' for example? Did it dawn on us as War of the Worlds' became THE biggest mistake? And why the CGI and boring nightmare that was Poseidon'? Maybe most movies through the box office are just a sure-fire prediction or simply just sitting in denial as it was never going to be a box office hit in the first place, who knows?

The remake of The Amityville Horror' was a distress call surely to Hollywood, but no the recycling of movies, that were actually done well the first time just keeps coming. I thought we were supposed to be only recycling garbage..! So why don't we remake films that totally sucked? Now I know we can all think of many from the 90s and especially the 80s. John Carpenter's Halloween' barely saw any funding at all yet it is still a shocker today. Maybe that is why that too is now being remade, as it failed to suck! For example, to be more pragmatic about all this, how about films that simply ran on a shoestring budget and suffered from terrible acting

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>