October Blog Challenge Day 3

 

Day three. Look at me go!

The new Salem’s Lot movie released on HBO today. I’ve been waiting for it to come out, hoping that it’d be better than the latest crop of horror movies. It starts okay, but I tend to agree with the review I read over at https://www.rogerebert.com/ - it tries to do too much in a relatively short amount of time. There’s no time to get to know (or care) about the protagonists, except for maybe the scrappy, nerdy Mark.

I read Salem’s Lot for the first time earlier this year. Not sure why I never read it when I was in my Stephen King phase (back when I was 12 or so). Suffice it to say, it was one of the books I didn’t pick up early on. It’s a fine story, well-written, but very much a product of its time that feels a bit dated these days.

The movie diversifies the cast a little, which I appreciate. It also takes some liberties with the story and makes some changes I didn’t see coming. There are a few moments of genuine humor (as far as I’m concerned, Alfre Woodard is a national treasure), and not more than a few moments of truly ripe B-movie cheese.

While I found things to enjoy about it, the new Salem’s Lot isn’t a perfect film. Maybe another hour of action and exposition would’ve sanded down some of the rougher edges. At the end of the day, it is what it is, and since I get my HBO subscription for free with my internet plan, it didn’t cost me anything to watch. I suppose I might be interested in watching it again in five or ten years.

Plus, I’m really hard to please (cinematically speaking) now that I’m in my fifties. It doesn’t take much to sour me on a film lately. After Long Legs and Alien: Romulus, I will never again trust the hype surrounding any other movie. Go ahead, call me a curmudgeon. You might even be right.

Re-Makes

A friend of mine sent me an email last night to let me know that there will be a re-make of John Carpenter's Escape from New York. It's currently in pre-production, and scheduled for release in 2009.

When is enough enough? It seems to me that we've had a ton of classic movies re-made in the past few years: The Omen, Psycho, Dawn of the Dead, The Hitcher, The Poseidon Adventure, War of the Worlds, and The Fog, to name a few.

And don't get me started on The Ring and its ilk, taking perfectly good foreign movies and re-shooting them with popular American actors and releasing them abroad, almost as if they're completely original. After all, why would anyone want to see a movie with subtitles?

I'm not entirely anti-re-make: I'm more fond of the Dawn of the Dead re-make than I am of the original, for example. Yet it's tough to win me over to a movie's "re-envisioning" until I've seen it and given it my stamp of approval. (I've got much the same problem with cover songs.)

Escape from New York doesn't need to be remade, any more than The Breakfast Club did. Yet someone obviously feels that they can do it better, and win over a new generation of moviegoers in the process. Time will tell, I suppose.