What?!! This Column!?? 07.17.06: Issue #14

Posted by Bryan Kristopowitz on 07.17.2006

The "Day of the Dead" remake is in good hands...

So someone is remaking George A. Romero's "Day of the Dead," the 1985 zombie flick that has just recently garnered a modicum of respect? And the guy doing it is Steve Miner, an actual veteran horror movie director and not some music video hoodlum? What the heck is going on here? Are we seeing the start of a trend away from the hip and edgy flash cuts and alternating film stock and "Michael Bay" esque bull dinky that tends to give people sitting in the theatre some kind of vertigo? Are we actually going to see a movie that, yeah, probably has some "modern" movie making techniques in it, but is actually going to tell a story from beginning to end without any flash forwards or flashbacks that exist for no other reason than to exist?

Well, no. I highly doubt that Mr. Miner's movie is going to start a trend towards anything. In fact, it's the direct result of a trend that's been raging since the "Resident Evil" videogames became so popular (and to a lesser extent the movie franchise) and the hip and edgy street cred that Danny Boyle's zombie (and I did say zombie because that is what it is) flick "28 Days Later" and Zack Snyder's Romero remake "Dawn of the Dead" got rolling. People want to go see "zombie" movies. They want to see shuffling or running dead but not quite really dead monster lunatics rampage a city or a house or a stretch of woods and obliterate everything in sight. They want to see guns blazing, people running, people screaming, and they want to see the brains and guts fly. Now, we don't always get all of those things (look at the "Resident Evil" movies. They're not very bloody. They're not even really gory, either) but we go and watch anyway, hoping that we'll see something. Anything.

But what if I'm wrong, and that Steve Miner has been co-opted into the unholy "music video looking" trend and we're going to get a slightly lower budget rehash of Snyder's "Dawn?" Heck, Ving Rhames, the star of Snyder's movie, is going to star in the "Day" remake, too. As far as I and we all know, he isn't going to play the same character (that is unless Richard Rubinstein, who owns half of the "Dawn" rights and produced the "Dawn" remake has secretly allowed things to move over to the Miner movie and no one on the internets has been told. I doubt that happened, but who knows?) but he'll be there to act visually as though it's some kind of "real" sequel. If that's all true, we're still okay. Remember "Halloween H20," a movie that was essentially thought up by "Scream" screenwriter Kevin Williamson and had all kinds of hip and edgy in joke "Scream" crapola in the advertising and whatnot for it? "H20" is one of the best made obnoxious horror movies ever. I can't stand it, but the movie is still well made and decent enough to watch. Even if the story is just so not interesting, the director (and his collaborator Jamie Lee Curtis) make it good enough to deal with. So if we do end up with the more "modern" approach from a solid horror movie director, we'll still be in good hands. It can't get any worse than Uwe Boll's "House of the Dead."

And I'm sure all of us in horror movie nerd land remember that Mr. Miner did the first two "Friday the 13th" sequels, the ones most people think are scary (as opposed to the later sequels, something I don't quite understand. The sequels are a variation of the previous sequels, adding new stuff, etc. They‘re no scarier than the other ones). I'm sure he'll bring along some of that stuff to the "Day" remake. Some slow stalking zombies, seeing a potential victim from their point of view, and the inevitable "chow down" on the guts of said victim. That'd be great. And if they want to go for a horror comedy vibe, this is the guy who directed both 1986's "House" and the 1999 killer giant gator movie "Lake Placid." Remember that scene where the big butt crocodile leaped out of the lake and dragged that bear into the water? Steve Miner did that.

So there's nothing to worry about. Even if I see no real need to redo Romero's movie, the flick is in good hands. Even if it ends up tanking, it'll probably be better than most.

There's another remake, though, that's potentially coming up that just shouldn't be done. Just no way in heck. Even if the original's director comes back to do it, it just shouldn't be done.

Someone wants to remake "Robocop."

2007 will mark the action science fiction movie's 20th anniversary, and there will probably be more movement on the flick with that milestone in mind. They'll bring in all kinds of "esteemed" writers and producers, get some new director with all kinds of commercial experience and set them loose. They'll claim to want to either stick to the original's anti-big business storyline or go in a "different direction." They'll bring in some new CGI stuff, probably do Robocop as an animated creature like Gollum or Jar Jar Binks. They'll have Robocop doing kung fu and "Matrix" esque fighting. There will be no gore. Someone will want to do an M. Night Shyamalan or "Hitchcock" version, because that will be "better." Gore is icky after all.

Now, there was talk a while ago (I think it was on aint-it-cool) about director Paul Verhoeven and original screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner doing a "proper" sequel to the first flick, something possibly to do with terrorism. It sounded like an interesting idea, but it was never presented as a remake of anything. It was going to be a continuation of a previous movie. There'd be no need to reintroduce absolutely everything and redo everything. We could pick up where we left off. That could be something the movie world could get behind. But a remake? Or a "reimagining?" Why bother? Give the movie another ten years or so to cement itself even more into the cultural zeitgeist. Perhaps "Robocop" needs a big time nerd like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino to suddenly now "like it" in order for people to start paying attention again.

Even if they hire Steve Miner to do the "Robocop" remake…. It's not a good idea.

I want to end this week's column with a comment on the Spike TV "Blade" weekly series, which will be going into it's fourth week on July 19th. I wasn't too enthused about the prospect of the show, mostly because of David Goyer's apparent direct involvement in it. After essentially destroying the movie franchise with "Blade: Trinity," I couldn't figure out why anyone would give him a full on television series to "explore" the bullstuff he put forth in the last movie. The hour long drama, so far, has been okay. It's filled with pretty decent TV show action set pieces, the vampires still turn to ash when cut with silver or "contaminated" with garlic, and the guy playing Blade, Sticky Fingaz, is physically intimidating enough to make you believe he could be Wesley Snipes. But the show suffers from what the third movie suffered from (and the same thing that subsequent vampire like shows and movies have suffered from) and that is this notion that the vampires are "cool." We're steeped in all this pseudo Eurotrash crapola that gets boring very, very quickly. It was already done well enough in the first "Blade" movie, we don't need to see more of it every single week. Plus, at least in the movie we only had to deal with the bored rich kid thing for two hours and then they were all dispatched to the degrading heck they belong. And then again perhaps I'm just missing something and I just don't get it. Maybe people actually want to watch this leather clad preening every week. And then there's the whole "vampirism is a virus" thing. Yes, I know everyone wants to honor Richard Matheson and his novel I Am Legend and they want to get away from the supernatural reason for vampires because "science" is so much cooler in this context. All we have to do is watch "Ultraviolet" and see how that "science is cooler" ends up. It never makes any sense. Now, if they want to use science to combat vampirism without ever explaining the actual origin of vampirism, that'd be fine. But eliminating that "supernatural" mystery just makes "Blade" a fake science fiction zombie show with designer dressed ghouls.

We'll see how the rest of the series goes. I'm now committed to seeing how it ends.

I hope I've made the right decision.


Special thanks to imdb.com, aint-it-cool-news.com, bloody-disgusting.com, creature -corner.com, and Robocoparchive.cjb.net for the information.