Upcoming Horror Hodge Podge

I'll tell you a story that might put this all into perspective. I used to bitch about remakes of movies that were made only a year ago in some foreign market when this happened to me and I understood completely:

I used to work part time in a record store in downtown Portsmouth, NH. We sold a shitload of DVDs, too. Pan's Labyrinth had just hit on DVD and was prominently displayed throughout the store because I wanted it to sell well. Two people come into the store shortly before we close so I'm already a little on edge. It's 11ish on a friday night and people still wander in like they have all the time in the world. These two just lit my fuse. The girl asks if we sell flip fops. In a record store. Her boyfriend, this jacked Somersworth asshole with a fake tan picks up a copy of Pan's Labyrinth and asks,

"You guys seen this movie?"
I reply, "Yeah."
"Is it shitty?"
I'm confused but I answer anyway, "No. It's great!"
"Oh. It says it has subtitles."
"Yes," I reply, "It's in spanish."
"Yeah. That's shitty."

I come back with something about either learning to read or learning to speak spanish and a lot of shouting and threats ensue. The police come.

You can apply this to pretty much any foreign market movie coming to America. You can either spend 20 million on a remake and market it to a target audience or you can pay to have the original subtitled and limit your market to art houses since major theaters won't touch a subtitled movie unless it's something REALLY high profile and talk of Oscars are involved.

THAT'S what's shitty.

I will always have issues with people remaking something from 20 years ago, but although it sucks, it makes complete financial sense to remake a foreign film.

It bothers me less if people don't know that a film was a remake of a foreign one, than it does if they don't know a film was a remake of a classic American one. That's what really irks me.

You know what though, eventually you have to come to the realization that we are extreme lovers of film and not everyone else is. Someone is really going to love "The Eye", or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (04), and not ever know that it wasn't an original film. I feel like we've wasted so much breath over the last few years bitching about this stuff.

The bottom line is this. If you don't want them to remake shit, don't go and see it in the theaters. It boggles my mind how many die hards there are out there who will go out and see shit anyways.