The age of the remake is upon us

Two thousand and four is in desperate danger of being remembered as the cinematic year of the remake.

Oct 29 2004

Two thousand and four is in desperate danger of being remembered as the cinematic year of the remake. Can audiences really be hankering after so many by-gone productions? Or has Hollywood just run out of original ideas?

After scheduling feature film versions of the most-loved TV classics, such as the 'A-Team', 'The Dukes of Hazzard', 'Miami Vice' and 'Dallas', and having exhausted the supply of Japanese horror flicks to Americanise, they're now turning their cannibalistic instincts towards the home-grown horror. Both John Carpenter's 1979 classic 'The Fog' and the 1958 'The Blob' are on the slate.

Carpenter's original version of 'The Fog' was a full-scale thriller of the supernatural - a sinister fog bank comes rolling in off the sea to take revenge on the smug little town of Antonio Bay, North California. No shotguns pumping; no prowling of dark corners; no tricksy dry-ice chills. Instead you'll find a masterful simplicity of style, a lonely and determined group of characters under siege, and a childlike sense of brooding fear that almost disappeared in the '70s.

Although Revolution Studios have enlisted Cooper Layne, who wrote the disaster movie 'The Core', Carpenter will thankfully be on hand, as a producer, to hopefully ensure that the contemporised version does justice to the original.

This was something that was not achieved in the 1998 version of 'The Blob', which clearly illustrated one thing: that no increase in budget and no amount of state-of-the-art special effects can compensate for a slim B-movie plot.

The original 1958 version saw a large ball of interstellar snot terrorising a small American town by eating everything in sight.
Despite producer Jack Harris' pooh-poohing of the 'political subtext' theory, rampant Commie-phobia pervades as the ever-redder blob sucks the life-blood out of every sacred American institution, climaxing in a truly marvellous scene in which the enemy within devours an entire diner, over easy, with a side salad and fries to go.

The 1998 version was brought up to date with a government conspiracy subplot in which a biological containment team seal off the town and put the monster's potential as a weapon above the safety of the townspeople.

We pray that the 2004 reworking won't see the blob becoming a terrorist suicide bomber from outer space.

Still it could be worse - they could've followed 'Alien vs Predator's' lead and gone for 'The Blob' vs 'The Fog'. Although…? Nah.

Aleida Strowger

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