An American Werewolf in London

Now I’ll warn you ahead of time on this one, this will be a rant to end all rants.

I’m sure all horror fans can look back and realise that moment they became hooked on horror.  No matter how small it is everybody has it.  For me it was an American Werewolf in London.  I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw it on TV but I was young enough for it to scare the hell out of me and from that moment on I’ve seen it at least once a year.  It’s comedy is perfect, it’s arguably the benchmark for any movie maker wanting to make a horror comedy so does it need a remake? Hell no.

It’s arguable that some movies are dated and could do with a brushing off and re-imagining but why this movie? The only answer is going to be money.  Hollywood has run out of ideas so they have to fuck with the movies we have grown up with, simple as that.  I’m just waiting for the news this remake will be in 3D.  Movies such as Hellraiser and Scanners have planned sequels to make use of this technology why not Werewolf? Can’t you just imagine it? The wolf popping out of the screen trying to bite your head off? Thats sooooo cool, seriously…it is, love it! You must! Because Hollywood want your money!

In truth, Hollywood don’t give a shit what the fans want.  Hollywood looks at the modern Twilight humping teen and thinks that they are the average horror fan.  If the werewolf in this remake looks anywhere near as crap as the Twilight werewolves? Shoot me now, put me out of my misery because there is only so much CGI fluffiness one movie watcher can take.

There is a chance of course that Werewolf won’t be all twilighted out (yeah right).  It could of course go through the gore porn pimping out that is also popular at the moment.  The original movie was gory enough but lets add way more gore! Oh! We could add puzzles and make it Werewolf meets Saw! Where the werewolf plays with his food! Now just how awesome would that one be? Lame? Oh you so know it.

One thing I know for sure, if Landis does not work on this movie it will lose some of it’s magic.  The movie is full of his comedy, it’s his style.  Can you imagine them trying to remake Animal House? Any fan of that movie knows they can’t remake that movie.  Especially not without John Belushi, but I bet they would give it a damn good try.  They would lose the magic of course, but who cares…gotta make the mighty dollar don’t ya? Gotta get paid.

It will be interesting to see what “news” comes out about all of this.  Will it be the “Shaun of the Dead” of werewolf movies? Point to note on that one…Shaun was INFLUENCED BY WEREWOLF.  It’s not hard to see really, that’s how influential Werewolf is as a movie.

What of the transformation scene? Are they going to top that? But of course.  I can imagine it now “lets do it fully CGI! We so know they will have learnt nothing from the travesty that was American Werewolf in Paris.  Yes, it was an entertaining movie but the CGI transformation sucked big time.  There is nothing dated about the transformation scene in American Werewolf in London, it has never been topped by any other werewolf movie and never will.  This remake won’t give us anything new in the SFX department, if anything it’ll just give us another inferior scene and another reason to hate it.

A remake should look to improve the original movie it is based upon.  The problem with a lot of remakes right now is that the movie maker does not attempt to improve at all.  They add in some gimmick like “3D” to make it seem more entertaining and churn it out onto the viewing public to enjoy and spend money on.  The problem with that is part of that public are FANS of the original product who actually look at these remakes with such revulsion that it puts them off even bothering looking for good movies coming out of Hollywood ever.  We now live in a movie world where superior movies are being produced in the Asian and European market and the sad fact is Hollywood don’t fight back by making better movies, they remake old movies or just remake movies from other markets around the world and sell it off as their own ideas.

All we can hope for is something goes wrong with this Werewolf remake.  I’d love for them to decide not to do it.  Do you think they will even FILM it in London? Or just fake it in some studio.  I guess time will tell, and I can tell you something….if they change the ending and actually use silver bullets to kill the werewolf? Then they don’t know fuck all.

So yeah…rant over…