If you were to look at a list of recent cinema releases, you could be forgiven for thinking that Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah's highly controversial film about violence, masculinity and revenge from 1971 had been re-released. You would be mistaken. This is a shiny new remake, which inexplicably relocates the action from rural England to the deep south of America and replaces Dustin Hoffman's unhinged performance with the staggeringly bland James Marsden. All of the film's troubling moral complexity and fascinating raggedness is nowhere to be found. But although I am unashamedly wary of remakes in general, my response to this one was one of sheer confusion. It is genuinely puzzling as to why anyone would even consider remaking such an idiosyncratic and intriguingly flawed film. It has nothing to say that wasn't there in the original; no fascinating new insights or perspectives. The original was a flawed film to begin with; Peckinpah himself thought that he had already made his definitive statement about violence with 1969's The Wild Bunch. It can't even by shrugged off as purely financially motivated, as it is very unlikely to draw in any new fans, while admirers of the original will simply not be interested.
But Hollywood's love of inferior remakes seems to have gone into overdrive in the last few years (calling it rebooting or reimagining isn't fooling anyone). It's been most notable with horror films, with new and totally pointless versions of A Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Last House On The Left, arguably the most notorious of all the video nasties. I love horror cinema and will always defend it's artistic integrity and importance, which makes it all the more galling to see them stripped of everything that made the originals unique, exciting, provocative and, most importantly, scary. Instead we have a standard colour pallette of dull browns and a cast hoping for work in the next series of The OC. So strong is the vogue for remaking anything and everything that even the notorious grindhouse shocker I Spit On Your Grave has been remade. This is by far one of the most baffling of all. The few people who didn't find the original to be morally repugnant will surely not be bothered by a remake that is exactly the same as the original (I'm reliably informed that it's the same, I never had any wish to sit through it). One of the most entertainingly misguided of recent years was Neil LaBute's butchery of The Wicker Man, which has at least found a second life as an unintentional comedy thanks to the sight of Nicolas Cage punching a woman while dressed as a bear (see a previous post).
Obviously this has not just been limited to horror films, but it's where the problem is most widespread and most noticeable. And I'm not even going to go into the issue of English language remakes of foreign language films, something that deserves a piece all of it's own (I may have to do something on the subject in the future)
Remakes do not have to be bad. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, John Carpenter's The Thing, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Brian De Palma's Scarface, the Coen brothers' True Grit; all examples of brilliant remakes that are just as good, if not better than the originals. When those involved have something genuinely new to add to an old story, the results can be spectacular. But for the most part, maybe they should just be left as they are.
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