By Brian Prisco | Lists | September 3, 2010 |
By Brian Prisco | Lists | September 3, 2010 |
Usually, I’m the first one to decry the despoiling of my childhood with the constant onslaught of remakes in Hollywood. Every week another classic from the 1980’s seems to be plucked from my nostalgic mind and parboiled for moronic Two Thousand Teen Decade consumption. They’ve also been snagging perfectly good foreign films and paring them down into Americanized versions. Sometimes, they don’t even wait more than a year or two, as is the case with the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or the Let The Right One In debacles. It seems like Hollywood doesn’t have an original fucking idea in its empty little head anymore.
But then I did research. (I’ve been doing lots of research lately for the Litely Salted Trivia website which all of you are undoubtedly visiting every single day to get your asses handed to you by my beloved’s murderous Ghostbusters Quiz.) And I learned something interesting. IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE. Many of the classics from the 1980s are remakes. From foreign films released years earlier. Or from films that came out 20 or 30 years prior to them. And it’s not just hacks cracking them out. Oliver Stone, David Cronenberg, Stephen Frears, John Woo, Brian De Palma, Frank Oz, Steven Spielberg — they’ve all cranked out remakes. And some of them have gone on to be nominated for awards.
The following is a list of 25 remakes from the 1980s that you may or may not have been aware of. And believe me, this isn’t an apology or an excuse for them sullying the classics. It’s just food for thought to fucking choke on.
Bon appetit!