The Day the Earth Stood Still

Director: Scott Derrickson
Writer: David Scarpa
Released: 2008
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Jon Hamm

Dawn of the Dead

Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: James Gunn
Released: 2004
Cast: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer, Ty Burrell, Michael Kelly, Kevin Zegers, Lindy Booth

STEVE says: It's like Remake Central here at Casa de Steve y Nikki. Either this says that there are more good horror remakes out there than we'd thought, or that we like crappy remakes more than we let on. You decide.

I think I'm in the minority on this, but I actually like the Dawn of the Dead remake, crappy or not. There are things about it that annoy me, to be sure - like its lacking the social commentary of the original - but overall it was fun and violent and gory, and that's pretty much all I was hoping for.

3.5/5

The Fly

Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: Charles Edward Pogue, David Cronenberg
Released: 1986
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Gina Davis, John Getz, Joy Boushel, Les Carlson

John Carpenter's The Thing

Director: John Carpenter
Writer: Bill Lancaster
Released: 1982
Cast: Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilford Brimley, TK Carter, David Clennon, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Peter Maloney, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, Joel Polis, Thomas G. Waites

STEVE says: John Carpenter could live to be 2000 years old and direct every movie made in that time, and still never come close to making anything as good as The Thing.

4.5/5

NIKKI says:
Man, the '80s was a good time for campy, awesome horror. This is another movie filled with crazy looking monsters that the cast plays entirely seriously. It really works. I like this movie a lot. It speaks to all my scare-points -- isolation, paranoia, darkness. It groups those things in a really cool way so that you feel just what the characters feel. The tension is quite real throughout, and it all feels so authentic that when the big spider thing jumps out, you're not going "oh whatever!" but "oh my holy fuck look at THAT?!!"

Movies like Waz could take a lesson in what it is that makes an out of this world horror feel real -- atmosphere, development, and timing.

What happened to John Carpenter? It's like he made this and then forgot how to direct. Sad.

4/5

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Director: Marcus Nispel
Writer: Scott Kosar
Released: 2003
Cast: Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Andrew Bryniarski, R. Lee Ermey

NIKKI says: It's probably the best of the Next Generation Remakes, but it still has it's issues. We realised last night that it really does drag in the end, as Jessica Biel runs and hides from each and every character in the thing. And there's another issue -- there are too many damn characters. But, even so, it's frightening, it's got some good horror, it's teen victims aren't complete dunces you just wish someone would cut up. All in all, it's a good modern horror film.

I have a hard time watching the original Chain Saw, only because I find its horror so completely visceral and realistic. As soon as we put this one on, I remembered how well it also does its slimy, gruesome horror. There's something about both of these films that makes me forget they're just movies and gives me the absolute squeals. It all starts after the girl shoots herself in their van. GROSS. And then they go to the gas stations that's not really a gas station and there are all these flies on pig heads and it's gross. Then they find some teeth, then R. Lee Ermey wraps the girl in plastic, then Jessica has to help the old guy with the catheter, then the hot one gets hooked, then Eric Balfour gets his face cut off. Grossness everywhere. But effective grossness, and grossness that seems to fit the story being told. So, it works.

Yeah, so much as we love this movie, we had some problems with it last night. We realised that the remake perhaps tries to do too much. The old movie just had the three members of the family, and this one has mothers, fathers, sisters, grandparents, little kids... it's not good, and it overdoes the creepy. And the old movie really kept the action focused inside the house and with the family, which was really the main purpose of the film, to look at this strange group. The new movie takes the action outside and makes it a real can and mouse chase, and that can get tedious. I believe the political undertones of the first film are also removed. This one had a theme more like Friday the 13th, with Leatherface's mum pissed off at kids for tormenting her boy. Which is a bit boring, and kind of silly for a film set in the charged early 1970s.

I really didn't like, either, the final shot of Leatherface as Jessica gets away. He looks like as evil monster. In the original, he flails about on the road and looks like what he is, a confused stray.

Still, I enjoy the remake. I like the kids, it's absolutely beautiful to look at, and I scream at the gross stuff. Success.

3/5

Black Christmas, dir. Glen Morgan (2006)

NIKKI says:

Sigh. Someone eats an eyeball in this movie. It's fucking gross. That's so all I want to say about this movie, and even that was forced.

It's just another pointless remake that does nothing to enhance the story, further the genre, or make us want at all to look at its predecessor. It's just a sorry excuse for some bullshit writing, some bullshit effects, and some bullshit storytelling that could not have been less effective had the dialogue all been dubbed by chirping geese.

My god, Lacey Chabert. Go talk to the Playboy editors -- there's legitimate work out there.

Fucking hell.

But I have only myself to blame.

.5/5

House of Wax, dir. Andre De Toth (1953)

Shutter, dir. Masayuki Ochiai (2008)

NIKKI says:

Oh man. We knew it was going to suck. So, we have no one to blame. But, you know, it didn't suck as much as it could have. There are so many Asian-horror remakes around that star teen TV stars from the '90s, and for one to stand out as not totally lame is really pretty good. This one wanted to be smarter than The Grudge remakes and The Eye, and it really showed. It's just a pity it didn't come together. The chick in it acted her heart out, and I think her intensity was one of the main reasons I felt it was almost very nearly a sort of okay movie.

The scares were better, as in, not so CGI. But the end was a dead giveaway from the start. Why else is scary-faced kid from Nip/Tuck even in the thing? But ... meh. And who still uses film anyway? So much film-use in this movie ...

2/5

STEVE says:

Yeah, it was lame. But something was different.

This wasn't like The Ring or The Eye or The Grudge or Pulse or Premonition or any of the other myriad remakes of Asian horror flicks in the cineplexes these days. I'd like to say it was because I hadn't seen the original, as we had with The Eye and The Grudge and The Ring, and therefore had nothing to compare it to, but I hadn't seen the original Pulse or Premonition before we watched those remakes, and both bored me up the wall regardless.

Something about Shutter seemed... earnest. Someone was trying their damnedest to make a scary movie here, and - though failing on many, many levels - it shows. The performances by Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor were honest, real. While much of the plot was pretty standard, we could overlook it because these characters weren't just plodding their way through the paint-by-numbers script like Sarah Michelle Gellar, Naomi Watts and Sandra Bullock before them.

I want to shun all Asian horror remakes, but when something like this comes along, something that raises the bar, even slightly, I know I'll end up seeing the remake of A Tale of Two Sisters when it's released next year as The Uninvited. Maybe someday they'll get it right.

2/5

The Eye, dir. Xavier Palud, David Moreau (2008)

NIKKI says:
I don't know what drew me to watch it -- could be my desire to see every horror movie ever made; could be my need to be culturally aware about every damn movie-related thing; could be that addiction to shite I need to see someone about. Whatever the case, there was no way I wasn't watching this. And even though it had no chance of living up to its Chinese predecessor, it wasn't as bad as some American horror remakes, like The Ring. It was still lame.

I expected it to be lamer, especially with Gothika "writer" Sebastian Gutierrez responsible for the screenplay. Gutierrez also wrote Snakes on a Plane which was utter trash as well. He tries here to stick to the original, and while there are some major plot disconnections for me, he's not the reason this doesn't work. That issues hangs on Moreau and Palud who clearly have little idea how to scare an audience. I don't get why guys like these who have been given the chance to direct a scary movie don't go out and research scary movies. They needn't go that far even -- just hire out the original Eye and DO EXACTLY WHAT THEY DID. Instead, those ultra-creepy scene from the original are watered way down with stupid CGI ghosts effects and absolutely zero tension.

If you've seen the original -- remember the dead guy in the elevator? Why was that so frightening in the original, but borderline funny here? Do the Chinese just have a better sense of overall atmosphere when it comes to films like this? Remember the school scene with the calligraphy? "Get out of my chair!" Oh my god! That scene is probably the scariest I've ever seen on film. Why can't the remake replicate that? Does putting Jessica Alba (or any well-known, mainstream actress) just negate the scary? Does a US setting add a been-there-seen-that quality to such flicks?

Let's explore... Calligraphy chair, as well as the girl under the sink in Tale of Two Sisters, Sadako coming out of the TV in Ringu, the little boy in the banister in Ju-on -- these are all officially my most memorable movie moments for sheer freak-out factor. Like, not just the creeps or the chills or a slight jump, but heart-pounding, vomit-inducing, CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE kinda stuff. Coincidence that they're all from Asian horror flicks? I really don't think so.

The Asians just do it better. It's the only conclusion I can come to. It's like Italians and red wine. They just do it better. They can't help it. Although, the Asian horror flick fest of awesome has dried up over the past few years. Are there new Pangs out there? Have I just not found them?

2/5

STEVE says:

It took two directors to screw up the work of the Pang Brothers. I like that kind of symmetry.

This movie followed the original almost shot for shot, and still managed to be piss-weak. There oughta be some kind of award for that.

Palud, Moreau: How do you fuck up that elevator scene?

It's like this every time. Why do we keep watching these remakes? I blame Nikki. But mark my words - there's no way in HELL I'll be watching Quarantine...

2/5

The Invasion dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel (2007)

NIKKI says:
I'd heard a lot about this movie's ups and downs on its way to release -- that the studio refused to show it to critics, that scenes were recut and re-edited, the Wachowskis were brought in to shoot some scenes. In my head, it was a MST3k-moment waiting to happen. It actually wasn't that bad. And any time I can say that about a movie starring Nicole Kidman, you best take my word for it.

Nicole was her usual sticky self. The woman is perfect for a movie like this -- my favourite part of the trailer is when someone tells Nicole to "try not to show emotion". She doesn't have to try very hard, you know? She is such a cold actress. I don't relate to her at all. I just think she's a woman who reads lines. She did that here, so it was hard to really get behind her character's fear. I also find myself wondering, whenever I watch her, just what her co-stars think of her weird lips and face.

I also thought the movie missed a bet by taking the famous Body Snatchers pods out. Why would they do that? Did they fear making a horror movie? Is this supposed to be a comment on drones in society? Well, the pods are important in this story. It's like remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street and giving Freddy a gun instead. Or something like that. They changed the pod-thing to a face-barfing thing, and it gave the film an unintentional slapstick quality.

To its credit, I was interested until the end (though I hated the ambiguous final scene). I thought it looked great. I found it chock-full of atmosphere. But, thinking about it, it's a movie that wants to be full of political allegory, but it doesn't hold up. Should we look at the zombifying of human as a good thing so we don't fight and go to war? Meh. Characters just talked about this, while war images played on TV. Boring. It wasn't terrible, it just wasn't anywhere near as smart as it needed to be.

2/5

April Fool's Day, dir. The Butcher Brothers (2008)

NIKKI says:
What can I say? I thought it would be fun. I thought there was no way it could be worse than the Prom Night remake. I thought we could have a few laughs at its expense.

Turns out, it was the one doing the laughing that we had wasted our limited time giving it the time of day. Oh well. I can not stop thinking that this is our job -- to watch any and all horror that crosses out paths. We are, I've decided, the International Horror Police. You think you've made a horror film? Not until we deem it so! I can no longer chide us for watching shit movies. We have to finally realise, accept and enjoy that it's JUST WHAT WE DO.

(Steve, stop shaking your head -- you know it's true and MUST ACCEPT IT!!)

I'll keep watching them, because one day -- one day -- I will be impressed. In fact, we've been impressed too much by potentially shit horror movies to stop giving them a go. We had the opportunity to turn this off at 27 minutes and we kept going. So, either we know our place in this world, or we're just gluttons for punishment.

I hate you April Fool's Day remake, and everything you stand for.

.5/5

STEVE says:
You see what happens? After watching one-too-many shitty horror flicks, we decide to swear them off, only to get sucked back in again. And again. And again.

This is another one of those modern remakes that bares only the slightest resemblance to the original, in that they share a plot element or two, and manages to suck in new and less exciting ways, a la Prom Night. The thing about April Fool's Day is, you already know the plot twist - it's all going to be a big trick in the end - so why are we bothering to sit through it? Can't we just fast-forward to that bit?

There was no excuse for watching this. (Or for making it, but that's not my watch.) No excuse. I refuse to allow my time to be wasted in this manner yet again. See, my argument isn't against watching shitty horror movies; it's against watching movies that we know are going to be shitty horror movies before we even bring them home. There's a subtle difference.

We've been surprised by a few of these low-rent horror flicks. The Dead Hate the Living, for example, was one we thought we'd just take home and make fun of for an hour and a half. Turned out to be a very funny movie that knew it wasn't high art and let the viewer know that it knew. April Fool's Day was never going to be that.

Nikki's argument that we had the opportunity to turn this off at 27 minutes holds no water with me. We had the opportunity not to watch it all.

.5/5

The Blob, dir. Chuck Russell (1988)

NIKKI says:
I haven't watched this movie since I was about 12, and thought Kevin Dillon was cool, but felt bad for him that he had so much to live up to as another brother of a big star. Lots of them popped up in the '80s: Don Swayze, Chad Lowe, Billy Baldwin, Chris Penn, Charlie Sheen... some faring better than others in the fame department, of course. I love them all... obviously.

Kevin does well, though, to pull off the tough guy with the heart of gold. He's all rough and ready, smoking, wearing a leather jacket, rocking the hugest mullet ever. But when people start getting swallowed by a big giant pink slimy blob, he's ready to be the hero.

What a great movie this is. I had no idea is was such a good time. It's actually really effective, horror-wise, and the writing is good, which means the characters and story are engaging. I expected to sit and make fun of it, but I got so into it. By the end, the only thing I wished had been different was Kevin's hair.


Actually, I take that back. Man, the '80s were awesome.

My most favourite bits in the movie mostly had to do with the blob swallowing things. The effect was just really good. The blob would grab someone, squish him or her about in it's blubber, and invariably, the person would try to escape by running through the blob. It never worked. We just ended up seeing a strained, icky version of the person as the acidic blob walls shredded their skin. Eeew. The effects were just great.

So, a great horror adventure, a decent remake, and proof that computer effects are for lame-os.

3.5/5


STEVE says:
The remake of The Blob is neither as bad as it's supposed to be, nor as good as it could have been.

But more on this later...

3/5

Prom Night, dir. Nelson McCormick (2008)

NIKKI says:
Free tickets. And even that didn't make me feel any better about seeing this pile of utter monkey-drivel. It was stupid, meaningless, and made no sense whatsoever.

So, there's a school teacher obsessed with the Main Girl. He loves her and kills her family who want to keep him away from her. Then he gets insanity, gets locked up, then he escapes. He comes to get Main Girl on the night of her prom. He manages to get into the same hotel in which the prom is being held and just goes about killing everyone around the place instead of heading straight for her, which he has many opportunities to do.

Why kill her friends? They weren't keeping him from her, standing in her way, or anything. All the time he spent chasing Big Boob Blue Dress Girl in the gym area, he could have been out finding his lady-love. Was her death so necessary?

The police investigation section of the film was just hilarious. They're trying to catch a guy who is hiding in the hotel. So what do they do? Send out a major red alert and evacuate everyone from the building. Not exactly stealthy police work, really.

The most embarrassing part of that? The Main Cop asks specifically for the locations of all exits in the building. There's a 30 second scene about him asking for those things. Every other movie would just have the guy say, "Exits are manned!" I'd believe that. Instead, they take the time to make it all known, and then after the evacuation, they can't find Main Girl. Well, all the exits are manned, the cop says. BUT NO ONE THOUGHT TO PLACE A COP AT HER HOTEL ROOM!

Oh my god. They're all, where's Main Girl? And some other guy goes, "She went back up to the room." And the cops and everyone just look at each other and go, "Of course!" Well, where the fuck else would she be, you idiots!?

And then the bad guy gets away anyway, kills more people, including Main Girl's boyfriend, in her room, right near where she is in the bathroom, with people vigilant all over the house, knifed in the throat without making a sound.

Oh god, this was just TORTURE.

1/5 (The added half-point ONLY because Big Boob Blue Dress Girl was nice to look at.)

STEVE says:
John Huston once said, "Don’t remake good movies, remake bad ones!"

A good point there. After all, he was the director of the third, definitive and - pray gods - the final version of The Maltese Falcon. But good points always get lost somewhere between the Hollywood sign and the dollar sign, and here we are today, threatened with unnecessary remakes of The Thing, Fame and The Birds, still feeling the sting of Rob Zombie's Halloween and reeling from the news of a Friday the 13th remake that eschews Mrs. Voorhees as the killer and moves straight on to Jason.

But then here comes Prom Night. It seems someone has taken Mr. Huston's philosophy to heart.

We hated the original Prom Night. Boring and predictable, not even one of the true classics like Halloween and Friday the 13th, but one of the many wannabes that rode their bloody wave of success all the way to the bank. From the ridiculous opening to the obvious conclusion, we sat through every disco-tinged moment, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! It seemed like an excellent candidate for a remake. Surely this new one had to be an improvement.

Not so.

Of course my expectations weren't that high, and to say they plummeted would be a gross exaggeration, but they dropped as far as they could when I saw the name Johnathon Schaech in the opening credits - he of the abysmal The Foresaken and the curiously pointless 8MM 2. (I would later look up the film's writer, J.S. Cardone, and find that he directed both of those crimes against humanity, and that he and director McCormick will next be tackling - and, one assumes, beating to death - The Stepfather.) So once again, we're sitting there from ridiculous opening to obvious conclusion, rolling our eyes, sighing, and crying Get On With It! That is, when Dana Davis wasn't on screen. I found her very distracting. I'm talking Rosario Dawson in Josie and the Pussycats distracting. That blue dress, man...

And speaking of which - I know I mentioned this before in my Pumpkin Karver review, and I don't want to sound like one of those guys, you know, whose shelves are lined with the ever-popular Girls with Low Self-Esteem DVDs or anything, but - where's the fucking nudity? I was brought up in the 80s, dammit! Blood and sex went together like Hockey Mask and Machete back then. It was the age of gratuitous violence and gore in horror movies and, yes, that included people getting killed for no other reason than having sex. That was the very basic formula for slasher films, their raison d'être, if you will - or if you won't! But Mssrs. McCormick and Cardone apparently felt that formula was no longer relevant and decided instead to imply the slashing - seriously, there was more blood in Knocked Up than there was in Prom Night - and cut the carnality before it even gets started.

It's because of this lame-ass, ball-less, soul-less modern horror that we now have to contend with shite from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, shite like Saw and Hostel, and this new sub-genre of torture porn or "gornography" as someone so wittily called it. If horror hadn't been watered down since the early 90s, there would have been no such backlash, and we'd still have some decent R-rated (but admittedly probably still b-grade) horror.

Granted, Prom Night sucked for so many other reasons - poor plotting, lame character development, expository dialog, impossibly stupid police, etc. - but apart from all this, I maintain that it would have sucked anyway because PG-13 horror Does Not Work.

So it seems that Mr. Huston's philosophy only extends so far. Perhaps the next remake of Prom Night will get it right.

.5/5 (I can't even give it an extra .5 for Dana Davis - the .5 I'm giving it is for Dana Davis.)

Day of the Dead, dir. Steve Miner (2008)

NIKKI says: In George A. Romero's new Diary of the Dead, a student shows his zombie movie to a friend, who chides him: "How many times have I told you? Dead things don’t move that fast."

Good one. I wonder how pissed George was at Steve Miner for using super-fast zombies in a remake of George's own Day of the Dead. He might have been okay with it, actually. Because there's too much other stuff to hate to really worry about that little point.

Why did they do this? Why did Steve Miner do this? And is Mena Suvari really that hard up? This felt like a companion piece to Dead and Deader -- low budget, bad acting, half a script. I couldn't believe I was watching actual actors in some scenes. They felt out of place in such a shlocky piece of work. The make-up was awful, the jump-cuts and swooshy camera moves were derivative and un-scary. None of the major themes ever came to a satisfying conclusion (zombies with memories, the army's use of human guinea pigs).

The whole thing started out crappily but with a tiny bit of promise. Not all the characters were insufferable, and we felt like perhaps we might care about Mena and her family. She was also doing real well in the Kick-Ass-Horror-Chicks stakes, a la Sarah Polley in the Dawn of the Dead remake. But the story, the direction (sorry Steve), and a complete lack of purpose from the entire creative team here, let her down. Way down.

Another shitty remake that does more to kill the genre than keep it alive. And now that we have George himself making socially relevant zombie flicks, why do we need the imitators and copycats at all?

1/5

STEVE says: Okay, so Zombies can run now. Fine, I'm over it. But when the fuck did they gain the ability to crawl on the ceiling?

The original Day of the Dead worked as both an extension of Romero's original idea, and a stand-alone film. This new one works as neither. It's just embarrassing.

1/5

Death Sentence, dir. James Wan (2007)

NIKKI says:
Sigh.

I said to Steve earlier in the day: This is how much I love Kevin Bacon: I'm watching a James Wan film. Wan and his partner Leigh Whannell are a disease; their Saw franchise has secured them comfy spots in Film Hell, and regular hell, too, if there's any justice in the world. My disdain for this pair of whores knows no bounds. Saw was a lame horror movie, but whatever -- lame horror movies abound. But three sequels in as many years? Can you ever have enough money, guys? Really?

Ugh, anyway. That's a whole other rant.

Death Sentence -- Kevin or no Kevin -- was shit. I've had a few hours to think about it, and, yep, it was terrible. I'm offended and appalled that this drivel has the words "based on a novel by Brian Garfield" in its opening credits. Which novel? Because this bears no resemblance whatsoever to Garfield's book of the same name. What So Ever. At best, it's remake of Death Wish II, if only because, like that movie, it shits all over every point Garfield ever tried to make in his books. There's no social value here, just excuses for shoot-outs and blood. And, spoiler alert, killing Kelly Preston was beyond stupid.

So we have a man pushed to the edge because gang members slaughtered his son in an initiation ritual -- he starts killing them back. But that's not good enough -- to really get mean, he needs to lose his wife and other son (almost), too. That's when he gets to head-shaving point, which any good movie watcher knows is the number one sign a character has gone over the edge. Ugh.

Kevin! Oh man. He tried to find the soul here, but he failed. He was always going to fail, because there's no evidence a soul was even lurking at the edges waiting to be found. The question here is not how far can we push a man before he turns into a killer, but how far can we push him (not just his son, but his WIFE too) until his killing becomes our sport? Paul Kersey's original murder-spree in Death Wish was horrible, to the point where the guy had to vomit in the bushes to rid himself of his own bile and disgust at what he was doing. He wanted to make a real change, and used his grief, however misguidedly, to do that. In this movie, it was just vicious violence as in retaliation for same.

And I say again, so Kevin kills them all and them the film is over: what does he do tomorrow? What has he really solved? The film breaks him so much, they forget he will actually LIVE at the end of it. But what has he got?

1.5 out of 5 because Kevin gave his all.


STEVE says:
Death Sentence bares only fleeting resemblance to the novel it's based on, and instead desperately wants to be a remake of the movie that the novel it's based on is a sequel to. (Follow that?) The story was adapted with the same degree of fidelity that Kubrick showed King's book when he made The Shining. "Big scary hotel, drunk guy, psychic kid - let's roll!" That's what Death Sentence feels like: it employed some of the elements of the original story, but only enough so that you'd be forgiven if you didn't recognize it. The same could be said about the recent Jodie Foster flick, The Brave One. While not "based on a book by Brian Garfield" (a book, not the book), Jodie's flick could just as easily fall into the Death Wish remake/sequel category - along with about a thousand other indistinguishable revenge fantasy flicks.

One thing you can say about Kevin Bacon: Even though he's made some questionable film choices (The Hollow Man, Trapped), he's always giving 100%. It's a shame to watch someone like that, acting the hell out of a part, when no one else involved seems to give much of a fuck one way or another.

1.5/5