With the new Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers' The Eye arriving in theaters this coming Friday — and with the new Hollywood remake of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call hustling out to make room for it — Terrence Rafferty ponders this thing called the glut of American remakes of recent Asian horror pictures. (Not everything gets a pithy term around here.) The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu, and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, the director's English-language remake of his own Ju-On, guaranteed that there will many more films of this kind, even though, whether taken individually or as a singular continental phenomenon, adapting Asian horror movies for the Hollywood assembly line is a precarious business. Not that there aren't worse ways to go about it: as Rafferty notes, back in "the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and — if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky — shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla."
Read More...