Israel, an old friend from the political blogs I banter on sometimes, has written a cracking post for TFAD.

Over to Israel:

I would like to thank Simon for the opportunity to write this which came about from a rant l had when l sent him an email.

As a lover of movies, expecially some of the classics, l have never really been totally comfortable with remakes. Even though some classics themselves are remakes (the Western versions of Samurai movies being the best examples) there has been a troubling increase in the last few years to remake classic movies from the last 30 years.

Now, if these are done well then grudgingly you can say that they were okay. Sadly this hasn’t been the case as the complete piles of steaming manure that have been ‘Fame’, ‘Friday The 13th‘, ‘Race to Witch Mountain‘ (which l really enjoyed as a kid, that’s why it’s here), and ‘Halloween‘ have been.  Depressing as these are there are more to come. We are yet to see just how bad they can be with ‘Footloose‘ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street‘ both of which will soon arrive to inflict more horrors on us so the only film l am giving pause to is the remake of ‘Clash of the Titans‘ which is solely down to my unbridled and unashamed love of nearly any film where someone is fighting with a sword (whenever l watch the film ‘Troy‘ l get to the end of the Achilles/Hector fight and then switch off. If you’re going to deliberately ignore the telling of the myth to keep a character in until the end of the film why bother in the first place? Why not have them all survive at the end of ‘300‘?) My original question was “Why don’t they remake bad Eighties movies?

The problem is, there were not too many films in the Eighties that actually were bad. Okay, ‘Teenwolf‘ was one, but in a decade where the clothes police took a decade long sabbatical we saw an explosion of creativity with music and films that our now reality tv obsessed world can only lament at.  Being very lazy l went onto wiki for a list of eighties films and l was staggered by the number of good films l had forgotten which were made in that decade. I had forgotten that for every ‘Teenwolf’, ‘Action Jackson‘, ‘Buckaroo Banzai’, ‘Ishtar‘, ‘Missing in Action‘, and ‘Howard the Duck‘ there is a ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘48Hours‘, ‘Hellraiser‘, ‘Airplane’, ‘Killing Fields‘, ‘Lost Boys‘, ‘Platoon, ‘Princess Bride‘, ‘Once Upon A Time In America’, ‘Raging Bull’, ‘Scarface‘, ‘Witches Of Eastwick‘, ‘Time Bandits’, ‘Untouchables‘, ‘Wrath Of Khan‘ and many more to get the bad taste out of your mouth.

So l can suffer through the dodgy remakes and the rise of the franchise movies, expecially as a collector of comic books l can now see film special effect technology catching up and making a very good effort in visualising what l have been reading for over 25 years. That is until some sweaty pallid film exec gives a green light to starting a remake of ‘The Lost Boys‘. An act of heresy that will have me flying over to Hollywood to join the baying mob with pitchforks and torches!!!