Again, I’m guilty of not having seen the original here which probably makes me a bad film lover, though it seems to be the right way to approach the thing as the director really made it almost exclusively because he felt too few people had seen the non-English-speaking production … which is kinda sad in itself to begin with.

I guess I want to start before I go “off on one” so to speak (it’s not guaranteed but it’s possible … oh it’s always possible lol …) by saying, I get what the director is trying to do and say with this film (and, presumably, the original) – if only because his self-confessed intentions have been so well-documented. Again, I find this kind of sad – like the saying goes, if you could put it into words, well, what’s the point in painting it? And a lot of the more positive reviews of this movie seem to go in one direction against the criticism, amounting to, “You don’t get it. THIS is what it means,” which to me really says it all.

I didn’t personally get the intention in the end. By which I mean – I get it, but it didn’t work for me as apparently was intended. Though none of the horrors are actually shown onscreen, I felt as the end credits rolled that I’d seen them anyway – that I’d got my kicks, as it were, despite the approach. I saw Naomi Watts in her underwear and tied up, I heard her screams, and those screams were so terrifying that I looked away even though I knew there was nothing to see. So I won’t deny its incredible use of cinema … but, honestly, I never really felt like it was any different from what has come before – Texas Chainsaw, Last House, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs. Frankly, Cannibal Holocaust did a much better job of making me feel “involved” in the horror; in this whole department, there’s really only one short sequence here that lived up to what I expected.

Haneke is a fine film maker – you can feel a lot of Kubrickian influence here and I’m interested in seeing his other work. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are fantastic. All the technical stuff is top notch. It takes a long time to get going, though, and even once it does it’s far from gripping; and in the end, personally I feel it fails miserably in its aspirations. I think those who think the naysayers are missing the point on this one need to go back and look at how intelligent a lot of the old nasties really were.

As with the original Star is Born and the political thrillers mentioned in my Vantage Point review, it’s been too long since I last saw one of the original St. Trinian’s movies for me to make a fair comparison here other than to mention that I know for sure I was a huge fan of them when I was little. I imagine it was one of my early, “I want to be one of them!” experiences even if I didn’t really know it at the time. When Rupert Everett first started talking about his involvement with the new version (a few years ago now I think), I was pretty excited but that excitement ebbed as Mischa Barton first joined the cast, then the whole Girls Aloud involvement, the way it was marketed, and finally the reviews.

Ultimately I came to the movie expecting it to fail on all levels – the nostalgia of the old movies, a re-imagining or modern updating thereof that actually worked, even the slightly dodgy “perv appeal” a lot of the criticism has been aimed at. To my astonishment, I enjoyed every second of it and I imagine it’s a movie that I will wind up watching far too many times for my own good in the future. It works on all of the levels mentioned above and then some. No, it’s not going to win any awards. But though it mightn’t seem like it sometimes, I do enjoy a little pure entertainment from time to time; and this is the kind of thing that for me fits the bill. It couldn’t have been better.

After waiting years to finally get around to seeing this, I was pretty damn excited when I found a copy of it lying around that I’d previously thought unplayable. Sadly, the excitement didn’t last long. I was a huge fan of the 1937 movie when I saw it as a sixteen year old, it was probably the first “old” movie (outside of the ones all kids are exposed to anyway like Wizard of Oz and Snow White etc) I’d seen and among the first to really make me cry my eyes out (“This is Mrs Norman Maine!” lol I can actually barely remember the movie but that line will always be with me). One would think such an influential introduction to the original would put me off the remakes, but how can you refuse the 50s version with Judy Garland and James Mason and then this, with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson?

Well, the problem with this version of the story is, it’s pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be; now that I’ve seen it, I wonder why I was ever so excited by the idea. It’s really more a showcase for Barbra Streisand’s talent and voice built shakily around the bones of the original. It hits all the marks, but somehow the story suddenly feels horribly loose, as though they’re just plodding through the plot points by the number to get to the next big song.

It has its moments, and it’s a worthy production if only for giving the world “Evergreen” – that scene here is by far the most affecting too … really, even in the music department outside of that song, this one disappoints. Compared to the emotion I wanted from it, I really couldn’t feel more let down. I’ve been amazed thinking lately why there hasn’t been another remake of the story since this one; now, having seen it, I don’t know whether to simply realise this is why that is or to wonder even more – afterall, I honestly think even a new remake with a Lindsay or Britney or Ashlee-a-like would have the potential to work better than this overall.

I think I may have half-seen this before ‘cos some parts of it I recognised (and not from the original). What can I say … the guy’s wishes suck, the gender divide is too broad (though there really should always be a sex change wish in these things, whether intended by the wisher or not, I have to say LOL), and it makes the terrible, tired, terrible, tired gay musical-lover gag … but I can’t help it. Maybe it’s that you give me a movie like this and it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad because I’m happy enough for 90 minutes thinking up my own wishes and how I’d phrase them lol; maybe it’s that Brendan Fraser’s surprisingly good, reminding me at times of Trevor Fehrman in Clerks II when he’s the “real” Elliot; but I found this a surprisingly decent remake of the surprisingly fun Peter Cook/Dudley Moore version – I felt as much right from the “Big Mac and a Coke” version of the “sixpence iced lolly” scene. I really can’t think of a truly bad thing to say of it outside of those personal nitpicks above.

Hmph. Figures. I thought this was gonna be the old Brian De Palma movie but it turns out to be a remake thereof that I’ve never heard of lol. I watched anyway since the cast list includes Chloe Sevigny and Stephen Rea, and to be honest there are a lot of moments here where I could easily have been convinced – especially considering his recent output prior to Redacted – that it was at the least a much older movie, and at best directed by De Palma himself. I haven’t seen the original so I don’t know if it’s one of his movies that displays the stylish Hitchcock homagery he shortly thereafter became known for, but that’s what I’m referring to here at least. This is all well and good, and makes for an interesting 90 minutes … but I’m just left wondering exactly what the point of it was.

In any case, it’s better than a piece of crap – any time I find myself gasping, “Oh my god” over the gore content of a scene is always a good thing. To be perfectly honest, the ending of this thing feels more like the good old Seventies than anything I’ve seen outside the decade itself, right down to the Rosemary’s Baby ish score. I’ll happily watch it again – though after I get around to seeing the original, I promise.

That this went straight to video despite the success of the Dawn of the Dead remake and despite the presence of Ving Rhames and Mena Suvari in the cast was about the worst omen a zombie movie could have, and I’d read some pretty bad things about it. As always, though, I seem to come from a different place than most interested parties on this one; I wasn’t that crazy for Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn, though the original Day has its moments it’s still no original Dawn, and just last year I had, some might say, the misfortune of seeing Day of the Dead 2: Contagion, which I actually found myself kinda liking.

There’s nothing wrong with this one at all – that they even include to an extent the “docile zombie” element from the original is all I need to forgive any of its failings. No, that element isn’t probed as beautifully as Romero did; but they come closer than Snyder’s Dawn which, even though they used a mall and everything, completely missed the point of Romero’s original. The gore is fantastic, and frankly I’m baffled as to why anyone thought this wouldn’t do well on the big screen.

There’s literally nothing to say about this one. Like, it even failed to be quite so bad as I’d been led to believe. But right from the dodgy opening credits, this is just a miserably cheap excuse for a Christmas movie. Harvey Fierstein should be absolutely ashamed of himself for stooping so low as he does here, but the rest of the cast aren’t much more excusable. When there are movies out there like Elf and The Grinch that effortlessly bear brute-force repeat viewings this time of year, stuff like this really should be pictured next to the word “waste” in the dictionary.

Typical. The idea was to watch the theatrical cut here but I got saddled with the “uncut” version which, if anything, contains more random fluff than the workprint I saw earlier in the year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved the extra bits then. My fear was that the “theatrical” cut would excise a lot of the young Mikey stuff which I loved so much, not least because of the incredible Daeg Faerch. Apparently this isn’t so, and if anything this “uncut” version is just too much. The workprint left something to the imagination, I felt, something I couldn’t put my finger on. This has a ton of stuff that could easily be removed without anyone noticing. If the theatrical cut makes things even more vague than the workprint while keeping all the young Mikey stuff, I still hold out hope for this being even better than I originally thought it was. For now, though, though the different ending here is a little too drawn out for me, I loved the mirroring of the “Laurie in the closet” sequence of the original, and her scream fading into the slides at the end was almost worth the meandering. I think this is one of those movies I’m going to find a lot more in each time I watch. The 2-disc DVD is definitely a must. More when I finally see the “proper” version, lol.

4th September, 2007:

Yeh, yeh, naughty naughty watched the workprint. Normally I wouldn’t mention the fact, but in this case I understand there are too many differences between this pre-release cut and the one that’s hitting cinemas for me to get away with it, lol. I’ll almost certainly see this when it comes out here, especially if it’s around or, better still, on Halloween (what’s with releasing it on August 31st anyway? lol I’m sure there are reasons but it can’t help looking like there’s an idiot in charge of the studio calendar, lol)

What I can say for now is that I did think this would be pretty damn good from the moment I heard about it – I personally didn’t like Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses and I never got around to watching its sequel The Devil’s Rejects (definitely on the to-do list now, though), but I did like what he seemed to be trying to do there, and he seemed to be a perfect choice to remake this classic (yes it’s a remake, IMDb pedants, why does that word have to instantly make it bad?), and of course he made one of the more enjoyable contributions to Grindhouse (“Werewolf Women of the SS”).

I thought it’d be good … but not this good, not by a long shot. This thing made my skin crawl and neck hairs prickle like few recent horror movies – few horror movies ever – have. Zombie really sells the horror, as the best always have, through sound as well as images – many of them, along with the score, wisely taken practically unaltered straight from Carpenter’s original. Zombie’s movie is dirtier, shakier, yet almost a little studio slicker at the same time – I definitely want to compare it to the Texas Chain Saw remake (which I liked almost as much, again to my surprise) – its characters are more fully fleshed out than Carpenter’s exercise in simplicity (right down, of course, to his unforgettable minimalist score).

Whether this fleshiness is a good thing or bad thing, that’s the big argument people will have over this movie. I’m not too sure myself as yet (I don’t even know how much of this stuff remains, maybe they have butchered it to simplicity). On the one hand, I didn’t particularly want to see Myers painted the way these things so often go, “oh it was all in his upbringing you see – he was bullied, that’s why he killed,” etc, stopping barely short of fully excusing his crimes; on the other hand, the movie (in the workprint form, at least) does do this to an incredible extent (his first kill as an adult – and I’m told this has been removed from the theatrical cut – is an act of vengeance I’m sure few will frown upon; at the end, Malcolm MacDowell tells him in so many words, “It’s my fault, Michael; I let you down.”) but it barely bugged me at all. The ending (here, at least) has Laurie (played amazingly well by Scout Taylor-Compton, sometimes uncannily reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in the original) crying over her brother’s body and it sort of reminded me a little of that weird emotional stuff that creeps into Prom Night (if my memory serves me correctly) at the end … it kind of works, but you kind of can’t quite bring yourself to let it in too far.

In the end, I feel like I can confidently say even of the as-yet-unseen theatrical cut, as an entry in the franchise, it works. The horror part, at least, definitely works, Zombie can do this almost as well as the old masters. The sound mix is terrific, the casting superb. The whole package has to be admired. I loved the kid who played the 10-year-old Myers, Daeg Faerch (so cute but so scary); there’s the cunning casting of Danielle Harris (who played Myers’ niece in parts IV and V and seems to have magically slowed her aging process somewhere in the mid-nineties, lol) as Laurie’s friend Annie; and how can you really argue with the replacing of Donald Pleasance with Malcolm McDowell?; in a nutshell, I’m astounded to read that anybody is disappointed by this, let alone so many … in my opinion it’s so much better than could’ve been expected that it practically tops the original. And I think they’d have to reshoot the whole thing with Renny Harlin to make it that much worse as I’ve heard in its official release format.