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The death of cinema


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The death of cinema

Posted 09-15-2011 at 06:31 PM by Sekto Springs
List of planned remakes (the most outrageous ones in bold):

- Akira (And westernized no less!)
- A Star is Born
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
- Battle Royale
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Cannibal Holocaust
- Carousel
- Child’s Play
- Cliffhanger
- Death at a Funeral
- Dirty Dancing
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
- Don’t Look Now
- Drop Dead Fred
- Dune
- The Evil Dead (Leave my pulp alone)
- Fantastic Four (I don't actually care, but still too soon)
- Flash Gordon
- Flight of the Navigator
- Footloose (Lol)
- Forbidden Planet
- Frankenstein (Can't we just count "Frankenweenie" and be done with it?)
- Ghost in the Shell
- Harvey (Isn't Donnie Darko good enough?)
- Hellraiser (As Doug Bradley so aptly put it, "No remakes, please. It's a waste of good celluloid")
- Highlander
- It
- Jesus Christ Superstar
- Judge Dredd (Okay, you can have that one)
- Kiki's Delivery Service
- Labyrinth
- Logan's Run
- Meatballs
- Mortal Kombat
- Porky's (What's even the point?)
- Red Sonja
- RoboCop
- Romancing the Stone
- Scanners
- Shivers
- Short Circuit
- Slap Shot
- Spider-Man (Saw the trailer. Looks fairly crappy)
- Suspiria
- The Birds
- The Blob (Wait... again?)
- The Brood
- The Crow (Would be easier just to take a steaming dump on Brandon Lee's grave)
- The Dirty Dozen
- The Incredible Shrinking Man
- The Lavender Hill Mob
- The Little Shop of Horrors (...)
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
- The NeverEnding Story
- The Orphanage
- The Seven Samurai (This one I saw coming, but still...)
- The Witches
- They Live
- Time Bandits (Yep)
- Topper
- Total Recall
- Videodrome
- Yellow Submarine (And I hear it's CG! Oh boy!)

Let's not forget sequels (and prequels):

- Beetlejuice 2
- Bladerunner Prequel
- Ghostbusters 3 (Which could potentially be awesome, though my expectations aren't high)
- Kill Bill Vol. 3
- Men in Black 3
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit... 2 (Originally intended to blend animation with Zemeckis' trademark corpse-like mocap CG. Thankfully that idea did not pan out thanks to the fantastic failure of "Mars Needs Moms")

Thanks, Hollywood.
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Sekto Springs's Avatar
Cthulhu will eat your God for breakfast.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 12:15 PM by Sekto Springs

STM's Avatar
I was talking about a non-existent bee God, so yeh take him. But don't disrespect my true faith.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 12:23 PM by STM

Mr. Bungle's Avatar
Kill Bill 3? That's fucking retarded.

The only one I can somewhat understand is a new Fantastic Four. The first one was so bad it deserves a reboot.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 01:46 PM by Mr. Bungle

Sekto Springs's Avatar
But the first one even had a sequel.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 01:57 PM by Sekto Springs

moxco's Avatar
:
:
Does it really matter if they remake some of this shit, it's not like

Admittedly, WTF?
What?
That's embarrassing, half of my sentence seemed to disappear what I meant to say was,

:
Does it really matter if they remake some of this shit, it's not like the original will cease to exist.
Rather ironic.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 03:35 PM by moxco

Dixanadu's Avatar
Shut the fuck up. I want to talk about IA IA CTHULHU FHATAGN!
Posted 09-17-2011 at 06:21 PM by Dixanadu

Wings of Fire's Avatar
Lovecraft's books will translate badly to film in the hands of a less than visionary director because most of the Lovecraft thing is his delicious purple prose.

You can't do purple prose in movies.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 07:07 PM by Wings of Fire

Sekto Springs's Avatar
:
Does it really matter if they remake some of this shit, it's not like the original will cease to exist.
It does matter. In many ways the original will cease to exist for the new and completely ignorant generation of film-goers. Several people I've spoken to had no idea that The Hills Have Eyes, Fright Night, Straw Dogs, The Amityville Horror, Clash of the Titans, or even The fucking Karate Kid were all remakes of their much better predecessors. This also goes for just about every J-Horror remake America has squatted down and pinched off in the last decade.

Directors who remake films are of the mentality that they're "repackaging it for the new generation". This is the same mentality George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have when they go back and edit their original film prints to oblivion. I know a few people who think the original Star Wars trilogy came out in the 90's, and were agape when I told them it was actually from the 70's.
These movies are timeless, and remaking them so every shot has an eyeful of CG or the dialogue is saturated with pop-culture references makes these films about as generationally relevant as the corn in my stool.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 07:28 PM by Sekto Springs

MeechMunchie's Avatar
:
I don't think Cthulhu ever actually appeared in any of Lovecraft's stories. Even in "Call of Cthulhu" he was only alluded to (if I remember correctly).
Well, define 'appear'. The Call of Cthulhu is an account of various other accounts. Though the narrator himself never saw the creature, he spoke to and read the testimonies of a couple of people who did. In most films the narrative jumps over to the memory. i.e. We see what the recounter saw.

That said, in other films this is significantly not done, in order to imply that the thing the person is remembering is too horrible to imagine, but much too horrible to forget. So you may sort of have a point.

(If I remember corrrectly. I think elements of A Shdow Over Innsmouth may have become entangled with that in my memory.)
Posted 09-17-2011 at 07:52 PM by MeechMunchie
Updated 09-17-2011 at 07:57 PM by MeechMunchie

Sekto Springs's Avatar
Aye.

Take John Carpenter's "In The Mouth of Madness" for instance. Though the thing wasn't outright a Lovecraft story, it was very clear he was alluding to him. He would only show 2 second flashes of the Old Ones. Just blitzes of tendrils, teeth, oozing sores, scales. You could only really see them in detail if you paused the movie.

I think that kind of approach was genius, especially when you're dealing with things that are supposed to be so incomprehensibly horrific.



^ This is about as clear as it got, and that's the way it should be.
Posted 09-17-2011 at 08:55 PM by Sekto Springs

Dynamithix's Avatar
But that doesn't always work though. If the movie is already bad or just average, then only showing 5 seconds of footage everyone wanted to see isn't probably going to work.

Didn't Super 8 do that? I didn't see any monster in the trailers with the exception of a very small millisecond flash of it. Did they show it in the movie?
Posted 09-18-2011 at 12:56 AM by Dynamithix

Dixanadu's Avatar
Yes, they did eventually show it. It's the same with the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens; don't show the aliens in trailers as it'll kind of kill people's curiousity about what it looks like, and they'd probably not end up seeing it.
Posted 09-18-2011 at 05:40 AM by Dixanadu

enchilado's Avatar
Haven't seen Super 8, but Cowboys and Aliens was sooo poorly written.

I haven't seen most of the originals of these, but I really like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I heard of the sequel a while back, and I'm hoping like hell it's decent.
Posted 09-18-2011 at 06:05 AM by enchilado

MeechMunchie's Avatar
:
Take John Carpenter's "In The Mouth of Madness" for instance. Though the thing wasn't outright a Lovecraft story, it was very clear he was alluding to him. He would only show 2 second flashes of the Old Ones. Just blitzes of tendrils, teeth, oozing sores, scales. You could only really see them in detail if you paused the movie.

I think that kind of approach was genius, especially when you're dealing with things that are supposed to be so incomprehensibly horrific.
That was the sort of thing that came to my mind while I was making that last comment...

*Walks over to bookshelf, comes back with Lovecraft book*

Page 139... Ah. Yes, he (the narrator) reads Gustaf Johansen's account of events, since Johansen had died some years earlier due to 'stress-induced heart troubles'. And I quote:
:
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to sun and air.
H.P. Lovecraft in a paragraph. What follows is the narrator's interpretation of Gustaf's interpretation of the voyage, and as I was typing, a little scene from the non-existent movie adaptation was playing in my head.

The main character is sitting in a pokey fisherman's shack, head in his hands as he pores over this scribbly account on a rotting desk. Unlike most films, we hear the reader's echoey internal voice reading the words, rather than the writer's.

That thing...

*Flash of sagging green scales, throbbing, growling noise*

That face...

*Flash of squirming tentacles and tendrils, icky slithering noise, plus more gurgly growling*

It... It wasn't... It wasn't possible...

*Longer flash, no more than four seconds, of a great red eye, bloodshot, square-pupiled like an octopus, with the murky green brow furrowing. A great, bellowing call, a sutstained thud like furious whalesong, a cry of hatred across aeons that can only be written as KGHOOL~OOUGH*
Posted 09-18-2011 at 07:46 AM by MeechMunchie
Updated 09-18-2011 at 07:51 AM by MeechMunchie

Sekto Springs's Avatar
:
But that doesn't always work though. If the movie is already bad or just average, then only showing 5 seconds of footage everyone wanted to see isn't probably going to work.
If the movie is already bad or average, then why see it anyway. Besides, Lovecraft's stories aren't specifically about the creatures themselves. More about the madness the protagonists sink slowly into as they become increasingly involved with said creature(s).

As for your comment on Super 8, I have no idea what kind of point you're trying to make. You assume that because the monster wasn't in the trailer, that they aren't going to show it in the movie? Yeah, because we totally didn't see the Cloverfield Monster, or the aliens from Battle LA, or the un-blurred face of the prawns from District 9. Trailers are tailored to give you just enough information to make you want to see the movie, but not spoil it. If you haven't figured out this formula by now, you need to watch more TV.

Also, MC, that was brill. That really would be the best way to go about it. That kind of flickscreen imagery is a great way of conveying that the individual parts are frightening enough, and that the sum of those parts would be too horrific to imagine.

Note: If you're interested in seeing what the Super 8 monster looked like, go here.
Posted 09-18-2011 at 08:32 AM by Sekto Springs
Updated 09-18-2011 at 08:34 AM by Sekto Springs

MeechMunchie's Avatar
I was disappointed by the Super 8 monster, but only once I saw it properly.

When it was crawling over the bus, it looked like a bloated, spider-type thing, and I actually thought, 'Yeah, these guys get it. That looks convincingly alien.'

Then it turned out to just be another bloke with four arms.
Posted 09-18-2011 at 09:01 AM by MeechMunchie

OANST's Avatar
Someone asked why they would make a Kill Bill 3. Tarantino always planned to make a third installment once enough time has gone by. It's supposed to be about the girl that saw The Bride kill her mother coming back for revenge.
Posted 09-19-2011 at 06:42 AM by OANST

Strike Witch's Avatar
:
If you're talking about 'At The Mountains Of Madness', that was cancelled. If you're talking about something else... I want to know more.
I've read the Mountains of Madness Nate, there's no robots in there!

:
Mountains of Madness did not receive the greenlight by Universal Studios, so del Toro's next directorial effort will be the giant monster film Pacific Rim, based on a screenplay by Travis Beacham, which was mistakenly rumored to be the basis for Legendary Pictures' Godzilla reboot, which del Toro was rumored to have been was approached to direct but later denied. Del Toro described the monsters in the film to be "Huge". The film involves giant monsters traveling through a vortex in the pacific rim where they attack major cities and humans must battle them by using mecha suits called Jaegers. He comments,"This is my most un-modest film, this has everything. The scale is enormous and I'm just a big kid having fun."
Posted 09-20-2011 at 03:12 AM by Strike Witch

Nate's Avatar
Sounds cool.
Posted 09-20-2011 at 03:25 AM by Nate

With the Men in Black 3 I hope they have the original actors!
Posted 01-29-2012 at 11:24 AM by sheridanm962

 
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