It may seem strange to state it, but audiences are really what cinema is for – especially horror cinema, which tends to be concerned less with high art and more with getting as many scares in as possible. So when you piss off the audience, you kind of spoil the whole deal.
And what pisses off audiences more than anything? Remakes.
Yes, when we love the original movie, the last thing most of us want to see is some other filmmaker riding roughshod over its legacy in an effort to turn out something new, edgy or profitable. But it can be just as bad when we didn’t love the original movie; when the goal is open to fix something flawed, the worst sin of all is to bungle it. Hollywood makes a big business of taking old, forgotten and non-English language films and remaking them, with American sensibilities, for American audiences, often dumbing them down and hollowing them out in the process.
So many remakes have indeed bungled it. Whether denying audiences what they want, sullying and misinterpreting the source material, and ruining beloved characters, there seems to be an endless number of ways to get us riled up. And here are 10 of the worst offenders…
When you go about remaking an already half-decent horror movie, you need to have a good idea of how you’re going to change things – doubly so if you’re remaking Brian De Palma’s classic Stephen King adaptation Carrie. So while director Kimberly Peirce had some sense of where she wanted to take the property, it wasn’t nearly far enough for fans, and often in totally the wrong direction.
Like the original, the film situates its titular shy teenager (here played by Chloe Grace Moretz) in an average high school in Maine. Here, she is picked on, bullied and ridiculed – only this time the internet is involved. Fair enough. But the fans who thought they were really in for something new were sorely mistaken.
Peirce then spends the bulk of the film going in hard on Carrie’s telekinetic powers, and the injury, blood and gore that comes as a result of them, without doing nearly enough with her characters or updated setting. This comes to a head in the once-iconic prom gymnasium scene, when rather than focusing on Carrie as a character, we are treated to a bombardment of digital effects-laden, slow-mo deaths, each as grimly “creative” as the next, while Moretz cackles and waves her hands like an X-Man.
It’s all spectacle no substance, and somehow manages to make the most important scene from the original film look like the party from 1999’s abominable Carrie 2.
This post was originally published on here
