Reboot. Re-imagining. Re-invention.
These are words that get thrown around a lot by the movie industry these days — usually when they’re trying to launch a new version of an old, half-remembered property, or fix a franchise its producers believe should have been more successful the first time around.
Sometimes it even works: Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and Martin Campbell’s “Casino Royale” are reboots in the best sense of the term. But what happens far more often is that someone like Michael Bay gets his monster claws on a horror movie he vaguely recalls seeing as a teenager and produces a new version that resembles the original property in name only, with everything that made the first version powerful or resonant drained away in the name of faster-bigger-louder.
Those movies are the ones I’m addressing in today’s Sympatico/MSN gallery. You’ll understand.
No ‘The Hills Have Eyes’?
Couldn’t do it; I may not like the remake, but it does capture the essence of the original film.
If I’d had room for ten titles, I would have put “The Fog” and “The Amityville Horror” on the list. Compared to those, even “The Hills Have Eyes 2” seems respectful of what’s come before it …