This brings up the issue of timing, which is of supreme importance in both horror and comedy.
In the case of horror, one need look no further than the cinematic skidmarks we have to deal with now. Silent Hill (the movie, not the game), The Unborn, The Grudge 1 and 2, Saw and all its illegitimate children, Rob Zombie's Halloween, Dead Silence... the list just goes on and on.
These films have terrible pacing and no real sense of dread or effective timing. I can accurately judge how bad a movie is going to be by what I call the Boo System. Count the number of times in the trailer that you have something pop out and startle you, usually accompanied by harsh sound effects and a shrieking orchestra hit. Count it as two if its preceded by a moment of "tense" silence as a character slowly moves forward to inspect something. These are Boo moments.
If it happens once, you're generally in good shape.
If it happens twice, it could go either way.
Three times, see it at the dollar theaters if you really have to. Otherwise, wait for it to come out on DVD or appear on cable.
Four or more Boo moments, and the director and screenwriter are obviously too incompetent to be allowed within 100 yards of fog machines, spirit gum and latex, and fake blood.
The trailer for the upcoming Friday the 13th remake masterminded by Michael "Never Had An Original Idea" Bay has 7 Boo moments. Anyone care to take a wager on how bad it's going to be?
So what is my point in all this? To put it one way, a lot of magicians use bad "jokes", sucker endings, and out-of-place flourishes typically involving Sybil and her slutty sisters to punctuate everything much in the same way a hack director uses Boo moments in lieu of anything genuinely scary.
Lately this remake mania has taken on a decidedly ironic thrust,as Hollywood began to remake once-low-budget 'sleeper' hits such as dawn of the dead,the texas chainsaw massacre,and assault on precinct 13 as slick,expensive,ultraviolent Hollywood spectacles,expressly for young audiences who have probably never heard of the original films and hence are unaware of being served last weeks leftovers warmed over.Usually the result(as with Vanilla Sky) is to strip the original work of the very qualities(its raw simplcity,spontaneity,and invention) that made it interesting to begin with.
Remaking a B-movie as an A-movie(or an indie classic as a big studio dud) more or less sums up the situation regarding the current (and indefinitely continuing) famine in Hollywood,its desperation to harvest a new crop of cinematic material even if it has to plunder the local farmers land to do so.
Of course,studios wouldnt give even half the money these remakes cost to the original directors to make new films(fair enough when you look at Hoopers,Carpenters,and Romeros recent work,but still).
The total dearth of good new material in Hollywood is all-too-aparrently the reason it is starting to feed off the carcass of independent cinema.
The Dawn of the Dead remake was a respectable horror movie and one of the more enjoyable studio films of the year; but even so it seemed largely pointless.Why not make a new zombie movie with an original script?How hard can it be?(by the way,im looking forward to bruce laBruce's OTTO, a different kind of zombie film)
The answer is that Hollywood is both temperamentally disposed towards recycling old material and deeply averse to working with new ideas.
Ergo,Cannibalism comes naturally to it.
Also up for grabs were recent foreign films that could be bought up and done over with Hollywood stars, free of those pesky subtititles.(the American public has built up a resistance to non-american movies-or non-american anything-and to reading in general,most especially at the movies,at least this was what studios assumed;the runaway success of Gibsons Passion of the Christ seemed to contest it).
A recent foreign art house hit such as abre los ojos(a visionary and sophisticated spanish film by alejandro amenebar) was remade-through the intervention of Tom Cruise and his director-in-pocket Cameron Crowe-as the asinine Vanilla Sky,a grotesque anti-vanity vanity piece for the star
...Ive seemed to have strayed too far off topic....
P.S.There are few exceptions to the remakes such as Chris Nolans Insomnia,which deftly adapted Erik Skjalabjoerg's original into a haunting Al Pacino vehicle.
