As Ranted-on About by Thomas Simmons Warning: I am man, hear me rant. I have opinions. Lots of them. Those opinions are frequently loud, vulgar, obnoxious, stupid, inflammatory, redundant, offensive, supercilious, obscene, poorly thought out, irritating, overwhelming, underwhelming, arrogant, rude, licentious, pompous, patronizing, verbose, suggestive, aloof, demanding, dismissive, vapid, cavalier, profane, conceited, delusory, impulsive, vainglorious, blunt, unpalatable, shallow, irrelevant, irreverent, and maybe, occasionally amusing. Video Junkie is not liable for any harm that may come from anything. This is a professional driver on a closed course, do not attempt this at home!

10/13/03

Finally! A Remake Worth Watching!
    Since I've bitched, pissed and moaned about all the utterly horrible Hollywood remakes on this page over the past few years, I'm going to break with tradition and ramble about something worth a damn: Willard.
   Easily one of the best remakes in years, this homage to Hitchcock is a great little gem that got completely mishandled by New Line Cinema.
   Perfectly cast, expertly acted, beautifully shot and intricately detailed this combines an inventively Bernard Herrmann-esque score with Hichcockian camera-work and sickly pale and dark lighting to create an atmospheric, stylish and very cool reworking of the '71 film. Even though the film contains CG and animatronics, they are few and far between and almost invisible with literally hundreds of very real rats doing almost all of the work.
   While watching it, I did feel that there was something missing and the ending definitely seemed tacked on.
   When I got to the extras (of which there are plenty on the DVD), I saw why. New Line ran it for test audiences repeatedly and each time it ranked lower and lower as more and more cuts were made. Finally they ended up with a shortened PG-13 rated version with a "happy" ending to appeal to the teenage audiences, who they figured had the most loose cash to spend on going to movies (apparently you can't make horror films for adults any more).
   The teenage test audiences hated it. So, naturally, New Line decided to market the film directly to them! Smart, huh? Smart like a fish.
   On the disc are a huge amount of deleted scenes and the original ending plus a feature-length documentary detailing the production, all of which makes one realize how compromised the final product was. Even so, it's still a really cool little movie with Crispin Glover looking frighteningly like his dad and R. Lee Ermy perfectly cast as his domineering boss. Plus the video of Glover's cover of Michael Jackson's theme "Ben" (which Glover also directed) is damn near worth the price of admission alone.
 

In Space No One Can Hear You Get Dissed
    20th Century Fox has gotten cold feet on the reissue of the Alien: Director's Cut and has cut the number of prints from 1200 to a mere 350! The whole reason they were doing the reissue is because of the immense success of the Exorcist reissue. The Exorcist: Quasi-Director's Cut was given a wide release and made quite a bundle. Now Fox has decided that they apparently have no confidence that a wide release is worth the cash to strike the prints and is going to do a small indie house run. How weak is that?
   For some reason, even though Fox is virtually bailing out on the deal, they have posted a video interview with Ridley Scott who talks about the new version.

09/05/03

Haven't They Heard? Hong Kong is Dead.
   According to Variety the "hot" new thing to remake in Hollywood is now Hong Kong cinema classics (and non-classics as the case may be). Over a decade after HK cinema suffered it's death throes, sending fan-boys everywhere into denial, Hollywood has discovered they can snag the rights to HK films and run them through the celluloid meat-grinder.
   Warner Brothers, proving they have no clue about HK cinema, has scooped up the rights to Jet Li and Eric Tsang's abysmal 1998 action/comedy Hitman that runs like a wacky crime version of Rainman. Warner has also succeeded in grabbing the rights to the 2002 film Infernal Affairs, which I refuse to waste my time with even though it does star two of HK cinema's finest Andy Lau and Anthony Wong... oh yeah, and Eric Tsang.
   That is perplexing, but the real news here is one that made my blood boil. Palm Pictures and Arhouse Films are planning to remake Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1976 classic Master of the Flying Guillotine.
   Hollywood has been pissing all over great exploitationers from a bygone era for several years now and anyone who has read my rantings on this site knows how much I really, really loathe it. How dare they profane the likes of Gone in 60 Seconds, Shaft, Rollerball, etc., but now they are going to bastardize one of the most influential films in martial arts cinema. As if that weren't horrific enough: "The companies plan to give this vintage chopsocky actioner an urban spin and set it to hip-hop music." Who ever came up with this "hi-concept" should be put down like a rabid weasel along with his entire family... just to make sure.

Remaking Remakes!?
   Special Video Junkie remake correspondent Will Wilson has sent in some amazing news:

I am starting a new, exclusive email column called "Remake of the Day" for you. I should note it will only occur Monday-Friday. Hollywood's creativity sleeps on the weekends.

Variety reports that Fox Searchlight has made a deal to remake yet again the sci-fi horror tale. The story of a scientist who develops a teleportation device, only to grotesquely mutate when during one trial run a fly gets transferred along with him, has previously been brought to the big screen in both 1958 and by David Cronenberg in 1986 (that second remake spawned its own sequel). Newcomer Todd Lincoln will write and direct this new update and he mentioned he wants to avoid the trap of retreading worn material - "I'm one of those comic book sci-fi fans who read the remake announcements and groan. This is certainly inspired by the original but it's a total re-imagining...Why, in both films, did the fly never fly?"

Now, the big question is, did he groan when they announced his remake? And boo to that Cronenberg guy for never making the fly actually fly!

- W.W.

  I think that qualifies as one of the stupidest reasons to do a remake that I have heard in a long, long time. Of course you know you are in trouble when the director announces that he is:

a) A huge fan of the original movie / book / comic / whatever
b) Doing the film because some odd plot point was never adequately explained in the original movie / book / comic / whatever
c) Going to rectify some real or perceived past failures and "get it right this time"