Message Board

A great friend and supporter of my work, Craig Van Vooren, has very kindly created a message board at www.davidmoody.us. There have already been some great posts. Please head over and check it out. A link has also been added to the menu at the side of this blog.

Shivers

Is there anything to be gained from remaking films? I didn't used to have a problem with remakes, but they seem to have reached epidemic proportions and the number of rehashes / reimaginings / revisions / redux of old ideas is really beginning to wind me up.

Over the last few years we've seen more than our fair share of bad remakes - The Fog, House of Wax, Rollerball etc. On the other hand, people have made a fairly decent job of remaking / reimagining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

So is this trend purely driven by profit, or is there some artistic value to it?I'm not sure.At the moment it seems the percentage of new film ideas vs. remakes is beginning to tilt in favour of remakes - they're an easy option - possibly already well-known, a ready made audience, reduced development costs... Less effort = more profit.

I heard yesterday that someone's about to start work on a remake of David Cronenberg's Shivers. I immediately thought it was a bad idea (the original is, in my opinion, a stunning film) but then I reminded myself that one of my favourite Cronenberg films is The Fly - itself a remake of a 1950's B-movie. The Fog is widely regarded as one of the very worst of the current crop of remakes but The Thing (based on The Thing from Another World) is widely regarded as one of John Carpenter's very best films.

Did Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho or Peter Jackson's huge, multi-million dollar remake of King Kong achieve anything that the original films hadn't already? Did they actually damage the memory of the original classics?

I'm not against remaking, but I can't help thinking that it's getting out of hand. Films are being remade because remaking old films is the current fad and it's profitable, not because the filmakers think they're going to be able to bring us something new.

What does anybody else think? Please leave a comment or visit my message board.