Speak No Evil (2024)

Neither this Hollywood remake nor the Danish original are classics - far from it - but this new one is actually better in its first two-thirds, better scaffolding the horror reveal and better filling in the nebulous plot of the Danish one with backstory and hints at what is to come - when horror finally arrives in the original, it is, in so many ways, so divorced from what has come before that it undid the tension ratchetted up so painstakingly in its first half.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Guilty (2021)

This American remake of the one-man, one-night, confined-space Danish thriller about an emergency service telephone operator trying to save a kidnapped woman, suffers the same problems as the original film with the decisions and actions of the main character so poor that a more appropriate title would have been 'The Incompetent', but I think this American remake takes the unpleasant little crime drama and better establishes the reason for Jake Gyllenhall's character's poor choices, including his heightened state of anxiety over some kind of formal hearing that is taking place at the end of his shift.

★★☆☆☆

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The Fog (2005)

I think John Carpenter's The Fog, the 1979 horror film with its solid performance by 70s horror queen Jamie Lee Curtis and effective creepy effects deserves sequels and prequels, spin-offs and origin stories but then along came this vapid teeny-bopper remake: the imbecilic plot is front and centre right from the first scene - blah blah blah founding fathers blah blah blah contracts - and because the plot is so silly, other desperate things are thrown in: stupid how-does-The-Fog-do-that death scenes; a show-stopping we-are-being-hunted-down-by-fog-but-excuse-us-we-are-horny-teens shower sex scene; horror sequences conceived free from concerns for the plot that see a young boy give barely a minute of his attention to a man drowning at sea or that see an almost comatose, insensible murder suspect next spotted running around with a healthy complexion (presumably exonerated by an off-camera court case - "It was The Fog, Your Honour - my client is innocent!"); and repetitive dream sequences to really unnecesarily hammer home that silly plot...

★★☆☆☆

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The Cat and the Canary (1978)

This 1978 movie adaptation of John Willard's 1922 play, about house guests and a deranged killer gathered in a mansion for a will reading, eventually finds its feet and for the last half at least becomes the comedy-thriller it wants to be (it wants to be a scene-by-scene remake of the 1939 movie - look at Michael Callan in the lead doing his best Bob Hope impersonation) but it is as though at the outset the makers were intending some kind of update - the opening shot suggests a psycho thriller and sets the wrong tone altogether and early scenes (the hi-tech announcement at the dinner party, for example) are humourless and go on forever - how many times do we need to see the home-help moving in and out of the old footage? - and weak performances - Edward Fox barely registers - and the 70s aesthetics further detract from the fun.

★★☆☆☆

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The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)

The byline promises it, but not only did I not "feel the heat" or even vague chemistry between the leads, I even felt my body temperature drop a degree or two at the sight, at one point, of Jack Nicholson's pancake derriėre and at the film's persistence in showing over and over hands clawing at Jessica Lange's crotch, moments added, I suppose, along with Technicolour and a bewildering circus visit, to justify this remake of the 1946 James M Cain adaptation, but neither is a terrific film because no matter which way you tell it, at the heart of the story Cora and Frank's murder of Cora's husband, roadside-diner owner Nick, never feels remotely necessary.

★★☆☆☆

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A Star Is Born (2018)

I lose interest after the early episodes of The Voice and American Idol too once the 'dreams come true' talent-discovery moments have passed, and it doesn't help that the electric first encounter and romance between Gaga's Ally and Cooper's Jackson in the first half of the very long movie descends in the second half into a boring highlight reel of "the sorts of things that happen" to celebrity couples.

★★★☆☆

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House of Wax (1953)

This 1953 horror mystery starring Vincent Price, a remake of the 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum, is preoccupied with getting all it can out of its state-of-the-art 3D technology and so features drawn out scenes like one of a high-kick cabaret dance and another featuring a street performer doing odd things with three ping pong bats and balls, which show-off the 3D tech but add nothing to the horror and mystery involving body snatching, murder, and a hideous figure stalking through the shadows of NYC, and so this reviewer prefers the 1933 original!

★★★☆☆

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