Ah, the reboot. Something Hollywood has become quite good at in the last few years. So good that almost the entire horror genre could almost be put into the category of either a reboot or a remake. Just in the last 6 years we've seen everything from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Hitcher, Halloween and now Friday the 13th and Last House on the Left.
Now, when I said the word good a minute ago I was speaking figuratively. The remakes that have been coming out have actually been less than that. In fact, I would use the word horse-shit, see I used a hyphen so it counts as one word. It's almost as if they decided to take the original scripts, wipe somewhere unspoken of and then toss it into the crapper and call it a masterpiece. Here's a couple of examples including the recent "masterpiece" Friday the 13th.
First up, Halloween.
The 2007 remake is considered by some to be the best example of a remake to a classic series. And yes I must agree with them in some respects. But in other respects I think they're full of shit.
The original movie was dark, moody and creepy as fuck. This all made possible with the fact that there is almost no back story given to the character of Michael Myers except that he killed his sister on one halloween night as a child. Then for the rest of the movie the rest we learn about the character is from Dr. Loomis, the one person who could be considered being completely biased against Michael from the beginning of the movie and someone who has written him off as being nothing but a juggernaught bent on killing everything and everyone and nothing more.
One of the best things about the original, and not including the fact that this is scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis' first horror role, is the fact that they took a page from Tobe Hooper's book and minimized the gore and maximized the dark and depressing atmosphere. Personally, the more the gore they put in a horror movie, the less realistic it seems and more cheesy it starts to feel. The lack of gore meant that they had to give the film a feel of nonstop psychological terror. I know more people who are creeped out by the beginning of the movie with Michael following Laurie around the neighborhood than the last scene from Hostel where he corner's that businessman in the toilet and fucking butchers him.
However, almost all of the original elements present in the remake have been taken out or beaten into submission all in the name of Zombie's vision. One of the first things that gets to me about the remake is how much back story they give to Michael. To me this is a two sided sword because on one hand you get into the head of Michael and learn what makes him tick and how be becomes the killing machine we see him when he makes his escape. On the other hand you end up feeling sorry for him during the entire movie because you can't help but think back to how bad he was treated as a child and he really was a product of his environment. Now, I know one could start an entire argument there about the ideas of Nature vs. Nurture, but I'm not going there for a fucking movie.
Moving on, another part of the remake that pisses on the burned ashes of the original is the amount of physical violence that is seen throughout the movie. In the original movie we see little on screen violence. For most of the violence in the movie they either cut away for it altogether or it's short and sweet. The only drawn out death in the entire movie is that of P.J. Soles who has admitted in interviews that the only reason it was like that was because she wanted to be remembered than more than just the only partial nude scene in the entire movie. In the remake there are several violent bloody deaths that are shown throughout the entire length. While I will admit that I do enjoy most of these, I also find most of them completely unnecessary and some of them being being utterly ridiculous. The original movie set the tone of violence with the beginning death of his older sister and her boyfriend, the remake went completely overkill with him killing not only those two but also a bully from school and his step father.
Finally, one last thing I have to say about these is the large amount of nudity and sex that is preset in the remake compared to the original. Now in the original the only real nudity we see are the breasts of the aforementioned P.J. Soles, but in the remake Zombie has no problems with complete full frontal of almost all of the supporting ladies. First we see Michael's mother stripping in a club and this is quickly followed with seeing his sister almost completely nude as well. This is then followed by a rape in Michael's room at the sanitarium, a scene that one could argue as being completely unnecessary to move the story along. The only thing that scene really provides the viewer is it explains how he got out of the room. Although there is a plot hole here that I must bring up, and I do apologize for going off track, what in the fuck happens to the girl who is being raped? Does Michael let her go or kill her too? Seriously, what the fuck Zombie?
Now back on track, I could list all the scenes of nude women being shown throughout the movie, but that would be a waste of your time as well as mine. Now one really has to ask, other than trying to please the college frat/jock crowd, what in the hell does all this skin really do for the movie? Fucking nothing, that's what. We get it, they're horny teenagers and they're going to fuck. Do we really need that shoved down our throats? Gross amounts of nudity seems to be an epidemic in horror movies as of late, and to prove this all one needs to do is look at the recent success of the Hostel duo logy and the invention of the new horror genre, torture porn.
Now, that's all I really need to say about those two movies. There it is, all the good and the bad things that belong to both movies, and despite the differences the remake was successful enough to warrant them to actually make a sequel to it. So, moving on we now get to the more recently released Friday the 13th.
I'm currently working on this part and depending on how my fucking internet acts should hopefully be up sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Until then,
-Azrael