There's much in life that I can abide by. Bad music, shitty beer, boys that don't call you back despite the 18 messages you leave them on their voicemail. But there is one teeny tiny thing that I loathe with every fiber of my movie snob being: I hate crappy remakes. And even there, my limits are pretty relaxed. I'm no purist: Does Rob Zombie wants to remake Halloween? Sure, knock yourself out. Debbie Does Dallas Part: Deux? Whatever floats your boat. But the news that Universal would be remaking David Cronenberg's 80's cult classic Videodrome nearly killed me. Who the hell do these people think they are?
Videodrome, for the uninitiated, is a difficult plot to explain. Lets see: James Wood works for a local tv station that traffics in weird porn. He's sleeping with Debbie Harry, who is also into weird porn. One day, an employee of Wood's starts getting pirated TVsignals from god knows where, which brings in images of the weirdest BDSM dungeon ever, "The Videodrome." Soon, the tv signal is screwing with Wood's head, making him imagine a giant vagina in his stomach where evil-doers insert videotapes that turn him into a killing machine. Meanwhile, Debbie Harry has disappeared inside the Videodrome, and Wood's desperate attempts to save her, blah blah blah, weird sex, weird sex, weird sex.
Now, not only is this movie one of the most disturbing in Cronenberg's oeuvre (along with The Fly and Naked Lunch), but caused such a public outcry at the time of it's release that it immediatly became one of those midnight cult classics, along with the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead, that you'd have to sneak out in the middle of the night from your parents place in order to see. It's graphic, it's distasteful, it's downright disgusting. And it's one of the best films to come out of one man's obsession with Marshall MCluhan.
So why would a remake suck? Because whoever ends up directing this project (certainly not Cronenberg, although he's still alive and making films) will tone down the gross factor? Almost certainly not: We live in the age of the Splat Pack, where Eli Roth and the Saw films guarantee an unnecessary amount of gore even if they don't deliver on a coherent dialogue. But Universal is hoping to change the concept of the film to "infuse it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller."
Um, no. The original film is so rooted in Cronenberg's personal style of combining the sexual and organic with the inanimate and mechanical (and the disgusting, pseudo-erotic meshing that occurs whenever a typewriter turns into a giant cockroach that talks out of its ass) that any sort of over-the-top CGI gross outs added will ruin the point of the film: Our bodies are not our own, they are machines made out of flesh and meat, subject to the whims of our sexual desires and the media's glamorization of violence. Please explain to me how turning this movie into a sexy version of Transformers will top the purely visceral experience of James Wood's vagina-stomach in the origanal.
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