Finally! A remake we can get behind!

Before you stop reading in disgust, allow me to explain. We live in a remake culture. Hollywood is seemingly bereft of ideas. All the beloved films of our youth are being pilfered and re-imagined by filmmakers who rarely (if ever?) manage to capture the spirit of the original, or even understand what made it so special in the first place. They’re rarely money-spinners at the box office either. Pretty much every attempt to reboot successful horror franchises of the past have been met with indifference from the movie-going masses the studios court. Kids don’t give a shit about Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, or Leatherface. The brands means nothing to them. Meanwhile, the fans that do care about these properties avoid them like the plague.

My proposal has always been don’t remake good movies. Remake bad ones!

Hear me out. There’s movies sitting in your DVD collection that you love despite the knowledge it was actually a bit crap. It caught you at a particular time in your life, probably in your mid-to-late teens when the movie obsession was really taking over your life, and your fondness for the film now is based predominantly on nostalgia. Not a bad thing. I have loads myself. But as much as we like these movies we know that they could have been better. Maybe it has a really great concept, but the execution does it a huge disservice.

Case in point, Roger Corman’s slasher pic CHOPPING MALL from 1986. It’s a familiar story. Partying teens get locked in a shopping mall overnight while the recently sentient security robots (harder than they look, trust me) start to take their jobs too seriously and decides to execute them. Brilliant! Except it’s not. Show this to someone with no love for 80’s cheese – bad acting, worse dialogue, clunky direction, synth scores – and they’d understandably balk. But that same story done today? Huge potential.

It’ll be interesting to see if my theory pans out, and if the director of Dry County Entertainment’s just announced reboot Robert Hall (of the LAID TO REST series) fuffs this gem of an idea up I’ll be fuming.

Because I’d like to see more remakes along the lines of BASKET CASE, MOTEL HELL, THE STUFF, and less of the seminal properties like THE THING, DAWN OF THE DEAD, HALLOWEEN etc. Leave the classics alone.

Are there any movies you’d actually like to see rebooted? Or is this writer talking nonsense? Let us know in the Comments below or on Twitter @Starburst_Mag