Remake Hell Vol 4: Platinum Dunes Special

Written by JD Gillam Wednesday, 14 September 2011

Remake Hell - by Jon Gillam

Platinum Dunes. Two simple words that when put together can illicit a strong reaction from horror film fans all over the globe. Feelings of dread, disgust and pure revulsion. Normally, for a film company that makes a lot of horror films, these sentiments would be particularly pleasing, but unfortunately for Platinum Dunes, they are not regarding the content of their horror movies, but because those movies have been made themselves.

The production company that is headed up by Brad Fuller, Andrew Form and Hollywood action auteur Michael Bay has been actively producing films since 2003 and shows no signs of abating.

Their roster of horror remakes began with the 2003 reboot of everybody's favourite human skin wearer in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Next up was Ryan Reynolds in The Amityville Horror, followed by a Texas Chainsaw prequel. Then Sean Bean destroyed the creepy memory of Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, and not in a good way. The next two films from Platinum Dunes were new titles, namely Horsemen and The Unborn. The company then returned to the well with remakes of probably the two most famous horror franchises of all time. Jason returned to Crystal Lake in Friday the 13th and Freddy popped back up in Springfield in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

That's quite a resume for a relatively new company, and one that has garnered little respect in the fan forums.

Platinum Dunes have made their bed and will most definitely have to lie in it.

I thought that I'd take a look at the company itself and give you, my loyal readers, a little insight into my thoughts on the films. As an extra treat, I also caught up with Brad Fuller to discuss the past, present and future of the company and Hollywood in general and see what he had to say. The interview is at the end of the piece.

First off, let me make something critically clear - Platinum Dunes is a production company. If you, as a horror fan want to see Hollywood stop remaking these films, then you need to do two things.

Firstly, stop going to see them, even out of morbid curiosity.  If the film makes money, then they'll remake more.

Secondly, don't blame the production company, blame the studio that has green-lit the project. Create an online petition, picket outside their studio lots, bombard them with emails pleading with them to stop. But don't blame the production company.

The fact is that it's all about business, as Brad makes very clear.

So the films themselves?

Let's start at the beginning, with the rebirth of Leatherface and his clan.

Tobe Hooper's 70s original was a visceral shock to the system. A non-stop bludgeoning of the American senses that was made in a decade that was on a comedown from the hippy and drug infused 60s. This was a wake up call to the home states about what was happening on their own doorsteps. It touched a raw nerve for critics and censors alike. Watch it today and you realise that it has hardly any gore in it at all - nearly everything is just off camera. Yes, it's dirty and gritty, but then that's where horror needed to go at the time.

The 2003 remake had a typically MTV sheen to it. A fresh and pretty cast that included Jessica Biel and Eric Balfour, it just didn't have that same sense of dread that the original had.

The Amityville Horror remake was a very different beast to the original too. It also plays up to its 21st century origins, playing out like a checklist of haunted house horror clichés and tropes. If you can name one, I pretty much guarantee you'll be able to tick the box off. Seeing as nothing has been proven about the validity of the Lutz's supposed real-life story, the jury is out on both films for me.

Next on the remake trail is The Hitcher, a retread of the 1986 movie with Rutger Hauer as the titular psychotic who wants more than a ride to the next town. Hauer had that certain something that embodied the character perfectly and made him the personification of unquenchable malevolence. Sean Bean just doesn't have the same gravitas to be able to fill the role.

After the new titles of the Dennis Quaid starring Horsemen and Odette Yustman in those underpants in The Unborn, Platinum Dunes returned to plunder the rich goldmines of horror past. This time, they revisited perhaps the two biggest icons in horror history - outside of Dracula et al of course - Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.

This is where the company really started to split opinion in the vociferous online communities, as fans and aficionados started to take a swipe at their film choices. To be fair, these two titles are the ones that I also have the strongest feelings about, and those feelings are strongly differing.

I'll cover both in chronological order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MiJzZ7FQX0

The return to Crystal Lake came after an eight year hiatus, the last outing for everyone's favourite maniacal mother's boy coming in 2001's outer space entry, Jason X. That film is a guilty favourite of mine, because at least it knew that it wasn't taking itself too seriously. Plus, it didn't make me want to rip my own eyes out, unlike Ronny Yu's diabolical wrestling match-up, Freddy vs Jason. To reboot the franchise entirely, however, was a bold move for Paramount and New Line.

Perhaps the biggest issue for the fans of the original series was that the whole first movie, where (SPOILER ALERT!) Mrs Voorhees is actually the killer, was covered within the opening titles themselves. This caused an uproar among the die hard fans of the original series, but those fans are missing the point. Friday the 13th is known primarily for the hockey mask wearing killer that stalks the teens in the camping park where he hides. So, to get his mum's death out of the way early on to concentrate on him was probably the best move they could have made.

The fact that the first two sequels were also covered in the duration of the film was also a wise move, allowing us to witness the evolution to sack and then hockey mask within the confines of one movie. It's not scary per se, but then were the original films? To me, they were more a series of movies that pushed the limits of the censors at the time in seeing how far they could go with the elaborate death scenes and special effects. Would Fangoria magazine have been as big of a hit if they hadn't been able to cover these scenes and similar ones in other horror films released in the same period?

The reboot is fun, has a hulking figure in Derek Mears playing Jason and even answers some of the age old questions. How did Jason always get ahead of the running teens when he was only walking? Easy, he had a labyrinth of underground tunnels, plus, he could actually run! How did Jason survive on his own? Easy, he had evolved and grown up to be able to create elaborate traps as well as harness electricity.

To me, Friday the 13th is one of the remakes that is done well. It tips a hat to the original and doesn’t veer too far from the fold, whilst trying to offer a different slant on the whole thing. It's less of a guilty pleasure than Jason X, and more of a decent undead serial killer movie.

Now, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a completely different kettle of fish for me. It is one of the first horror films I ever saw - back in the day when local video stores were a bit lax on their rental policy, I rented the original at the tender age of 12, right under the nose of an on duty policeman who even commented on my viewing pleasure, saying "Good choice!"

Freddy Krueger, like Jason, has become part of the social zeitgeist. A child killing psychopath that you can actually root for against all the odds. Hell, even the kids in the original series weren't all that annoying that you wanted to see them die - except for maybe a couple of exceptions. His ability to scare was diluted in the later sequels by his propensity for one-liners, but the idea of a scarred bogeyman who could get you in your sleep was a genius creation by Wes Craven. After all, we all have to sleep.

The 2009 remake had a trailer that oozed style, and the film even gave a stronger and more specific back story to the stripy sweater wearing janitor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SulpWn6Glk

It was also finally made very clear that Freddy was a paedophile, an issue that was skirted around in the original series but never confirmed. On top of that, I felt that the best thing about the film was Jackie Earle Haley's portrayal of the razor fingered killer. He was unbelievably unlikeable (in a good way) and had no wisecracks at all. Even his voice sounded like a realistic victim of severe burns to the throat.

Then where did it go wrong?

Well, in my opinion, they tried too hard to recreate major set-pieces, such as Tina's ceiling mauling and the Nancy bath scene, and didn't concentrate enough on new ideas. This was a horror film that could have done anything and gone anywhere. Where were the cleverly thought out nightmare sequences, where dreamscapes could have ended up with the characters finding themselves in truly scary situations, not just blindly running around a huge boiler room. Again.

Here was an opportunity to recreate a well loved franchise with a fresh slate. Unlike the Friday the 13th reboot, where you fully expect events to unfold at Camp Crystal Lake, with Nightmare on Elm Street, apart from maybe Nancy's house and the boiler room, we could have been transported anywhere, but we weren't.

It ended up being dull, and for a horror film that had originally used so much blood - remember Johnny Depp being eaten by the bed? - this film was unforgivably anaemic. Plus, what happened to that pool scene that you can clearly see in the trailer?

I could go on and on, but I feel I'd end up going round in circles.

The future of Platinum Dunes has them slated with further remakes of The Monster Squad, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even Hitchcock's The Birds. But they also have a wider roster of movies to choose from going forward. A lot are fresh ideas and some are comic book tie-ins, but at least they are trying.

To sum up, like any production company, it's fair to say that Platinum Dunes have a varied record, even for such a young company. They may have secured financial successes, but critical ones still evade them.

Who knows what the future holds?

I'll leave it to you to decide and would love to hear your comments, whether you agree with me or not!

Enjoy the interview and I'll see you next month!

JD

Starburst: What is the Platinum Dunes mission statement?

Brad Fuller: The Platinum Dunes mission statement was to provide first time directors with the opportunity to come from other areas and make movies. In the same way that Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson did for Michael Bay when he was a commercial director, and they gave him his first movie, which was Bad Boys.

SB: What are your personal feelings on remakes?

BF: I have a lot of fun making them. I don't differentiate necessarily remakes from originals. I don't come to a remake and expect to hate it, I stay open minded. There have been some remakes that I've loved and some that I haven't.

In terms of specifics, it's hard, I don't even look at it that way. I take each movie for what it is and evaluate it if I have a great experience watching it.

SB: Were the remakes to Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th & Texas Chainsaw Massacre purely made from a financial point of view?

BF: Yes. This is a business and we always want to make a profit for our partners. We've always tried to make the studio's movies so that we get another opportunity to make another movie. When we evaluate what we do, certainly commerce is a big part of that discussion here and it's a big part of the equation when we go forward on a movie.

That's a long way of saying "Yes, absolutely."

SB: Financially, it appears that all the famous remakes made a profit on their original budget. New Line became known as the house that Freddy built. Is Platinum Dunes going to be the house that the remake made?

BF: I certainly think that that is a fair representation of what we've done up until this point. Going forward, some of our films are remakes and others are originals. That is not a moniker that we would shy away from. We're happy that we were able to make a number of films that were profitable and we enjoyed making. A lot of the internet feedback said that a lot of people enjoyed the films that we made.

So if that is the moniker that they attribute to us, then we're fine with that.

SB: It looks like Platinum Dune's upcoming roster, apart from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Birds and Monster Squad, are more original titles or comic book tie-ins. Is this something that you are looking to do now?

BF: Yes, I think that it's more challenging now to make a horror movie for the same budget level that we made most of our films for. There are some great horror films that have come out in the last couple of years, like Insidious and the Paranormal Activity's. They're making those movies for a million dollars and that's not an area that we're equipped to execute as well as those filmmakers are.

So right now we're working on a movie at Universal called Ouija, that McG is going to direct and as you said, we're working on the turtles as well. Those seem to be the next two movies that we're excited about.

Having said that, if Warner Brothers came to us and said that they wanted us to do another Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th, we would jump to the opportunity to make them. We enjoyed making both of them very much and would love to do sequels to both.

SB: That said, there was a lot written online that there would be definite sequels to both films, with Jackie Earle Haley quoted as saying that he'd signed on for two more outings as Freddy. Is there any progress on those projects?

BF: There's nothing that I can point to that says we're definitely moving forward on either of those two films. We're talking to our studio partners about them and they have to give us the go-ahead to start doing the work. As of yet, they have not done that.

SB: Were you surprised at the apparent backlash that those remakes suffered from fans?

BF: Not at all, we're used to that. We expected it.

The internet is a great place for people to give their opinion. We hear it all and read it all. Some of it has merit and some doesn't. At the end of the day we're proud of the movies that we've made and the fact that they've been incredibly profitable for the studios that have made them. It gives an opportunity to keep making films, which is what we want to do.

SB: What would you like to say to the people who constantly complain about your remakes in particular?

BF: Not necessarily, no. I don't want to engage them.

SB: Do you think that the Platinum Dunes remakes offered anything new to their particular franchises?

BF: Sure, I absolutely do. We wouldn't do it otherwise. If we didn't think that we were offering something to those franchises then there's no reason to do it - just watch the original.

SB: With Hollywood, what do you think the future holds for remakes?

BF: I think the movie business right now is in a challenging time. If you're trying to hedge a bet on a film, whether it's horror or anything else, it feels like the studios now are gravitating towards something that has a built in audience, pre-existing before the movie was made. Those are the movies that are getting made now.

I think you'll continue to see movies that are based on either other movies or board games, cartoons or television shows. That seems to be the area where things are going right now.

SB: Do you think that boils down to the risk factor involved with new IPs?

BF: Well there's a tremendous risk factor and it seems that there are certain films that are made for the art, but when you talk about big budget studio movies, these are all publically traded companies that have a responsibility to their shareholders. They have to make movies that they feel will earn them their money back and a profit.

SB: Do you feel that the future of horror will be an either or situation. At one end of the scale, there are the zero budget films, like Insidious and then the rest will be remakes or sequels of existing franchises?

BF: I don't think it's that specific. What I've noticed is that where there used to be a middle level of movie budgets that the studios want to make, it does feel they either want to use a smaller budget using $10,000,000 or under or they want to swing for the stands and go for a big budget tent-pole movie.

It doesn't feel to me like there's a lot of movies that are getting made in the $20-40 million range, or certainly not by the big studios the way they used to.

SB: Platinum Dunes has a deal in place with Paramount going forward don't you?

BF: Yes. Between Paramount and New Line, we made Friday the 13th as they both held certain rights to it. Combined we were able to make the movie and take advantage of the title and some of the content of the older films.

SB: Since the release of Nightmare on Elm Street, the release roster of Platinum Dunes has slowed up. Is there any specific reason for that?

BF: It's a combination of us rethinking what we're doing and kind of sidestepping from only making horror movies and opening ourselves up to making bigger budgeted action movies and a wider skewing films.

It takes time to find good scripts and work with great writers and come up with, what we hope will be, great movies. We've been really focused on that for the last year.

SB: Why hasn't the official website been updated since December 2009?

BF: No. I will happily go and post when we're making a film. I'm not interested in posting anything that's speculative, I will post when I'm making a movie and I'll be happy to tell people what we're doing and when we're doing it. Until there is something rock solid that's definitely going forward, I'm not going to start rumours or things like that.

SB: Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Brad!