Remake? Remodel.

I noticed on Saturday that we are about to have a remake of the old movie The Last House On The Left unleashed on the unsuspecting cinema going population.

For those of you not in the know, The Last House On The Left is an old horror/revenge movie. It is a curious movie, that focuses on brutality and sadism interspersed with the comedy stylings of two cops who wouldn’t look out of place in a Police Academy movie. Most famous for being dubbed (and banned as) a Video Nasty back in the eighties, this movie is far from being a cinematic classic. Perhaps the best thing it did was launch the career of cinema auteur Wes Craven. Sadly, it also launched the career of cinematic hack Wes Craven.

Quite why such an odious little movie has to be remade I don’t know. Although I suspect that money is the reason for not just this remake, but for other equally pointless remakes. I mean, did we really need to have The Fog - one of the best directed movies I have ever seen – remade with the cast of fucking Smallville? And what did anyone really gain by having the jaw dropping and genuinely staggering The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remade into a vehicle for R Lee Ermey to do his now hackneyed brutal Southerner role once more? And don’t get me started on that fucking remake of Psycho - a motion picture that just remade a classic film scene for scene, yet managed to make every one of those scenes 93% less effective.

I can’t see why studios don’t save themselves millions in production costs and just re-release the originals. Sure, some of the hairstyles in The Fog look a little dated, but when you think about how creepy the original movie is, it would still be just as effective today as it ever has been. Likewise, some people might clock the outrageous flares in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but they’ll soon forget about them when Leatherface appears with his hammer and his unique, meathook related method of storing unwanted trespassers.

And if studios really feel the need to remake a film because the original is too dated or just not suitable anymore, then a reboot works better than a remake. Try to do something original – and the results may show themselves to be more popular than the originals. But when it comes to remaking largely shitty films such as The Last House On The Left my advice would be far simpler: don’t bother.