Generally, remakes are for total pussies. They are gutless attempts at updates or ‘re-imagining’ legitimately good pieces of cinema simply to can-cast WB actors.

But there are exceptions; sometimes by freak accident the new movie is better then its predecessor. This is normally accomplished by picking a movie that sucked to begin with. Which brings us to the current craze of remaking classic scary films like ‘The Amityville Horror.’

Cheap? Of course. Classless? For sure. More profitable than the original? Probably.

But instead of these soulless retreads why not put the misunderstood practice of remakes to work where it could really be used: giving second chances to recent horrible horror movies. There certainly is no shortage to choose from; over the past six months alone we have seen ‘Boogeyman,’ ‘Cursed’ and ‘Guess Who’ foisted upon unsuspecting audiences. Most of these complete shit storms at least have decent premises, like the boogeyman, Bernie Mac or vampire kids, and probably could be above average flicks if handled the right way.

For instance, ‘Boogeyman’ could be improved exponentially if you cast the nebbish main character haunted by the title creature with jive-talker Donald Faison of ‘Clueless’ and ‘Scrubs’ fame instead of snore factory Barry Watson. Then pull the switch-a-roo between Emily Deschanel and her actually famous sister Zooey. Then use creative license to change the setting from a rural Pennsylvania town to Times Square circa 1964 when heroin was the mayor and pimps stocked his cabinet. These are all cosmetic changes that can allow the current plot to function unfettered, unlike these demands:

– The boogeyman will not be created in CGI, but rather played by a chimpanzee or Martin Short.

– All dialogue will be spoken in Olde English.

– The Olde English will be subtitled in Olde Spanish.

– Instead of the boogeyman killing the main character’s father in the opening scene, the boogeyman will kill the main character.

– The father (played also by Steve Martin) will then lament about how big of a puss his son was for getting killed by a monkey/Martin Short for the rest of the film.

– The rest is of the script is a reverse comedy version of Hamlet, only with a corpse and a chimp or Martin Short.

Using this as a game plan, one can only hope that Hollywood takes notice and rights this horrendous wrong. Should we reverse the trend in time, there might still be some classic horror movies that won’t be bundled with their shit remakes at Best Buy for our children.

The future of the human race depends on it.

Published on April 14, 2005 at 12:00 pm