and another one... black christmas this time. at least it is directed by Glen Morgan, for whose FD3 im looking for like no other movie this year! lol

but the original has never been released in germany... is it any good? I only know that halloween and when a stranger calls were both intended to be sequels of it and then went their own way...

any comments on the original?

i hope the remake at least wont be pg-13... that gets ridiculous... has anyone seen the when a stranger calls trailer? good move to show the big twist already! ok, maybe we all know it already from the original, but apparently in the remake that happens not until the 70th minute mark... so you maybe shouldnt spoil that for kids who dont know the original...

well, it's a simon west movie, so I won't certainly watch it! yuk!

Roman welcome back! You still in Japan?

I remember seeing the original a few years back, and didn't think much of it at the time. Michelle Trachtenberg from BUFFY is supposed to be the lead, so I have the feeling that it'll be PG-13 territory.

Speaking of remakes, Sony sent me THE FOG, which I watched Saturday night. What a crushing disappointment. They actually had the OUTLINE of a story that was a lot more interesting than the original -- but they didn't bother developing any characters! What a waste of everyone's time. And how could they also not include one of the best scenes from the original -- with Stevie Wayne on top of the lighthouse fighting for her life with the pirates after her?

It was the worst kind of bad movie -- decent enough that it kept you watching but too dull to be "so bad it's good." I hated the ending as well, which might have been OK if there was any kind of explanation for it...which there wasn't

nope, still in whacky Japan... survived shops which sell used panties, schollgirls saliva and other things you don't even wanna know about. also stepped into a store supposedly about serial killers, but inside I rather had the feeling it was for or run by serial killers and HOSTEL came quickly to my mind, so I skipped walking down into the other rooms...

well, you have fun like nowhere else in the world... really!
just bought the complete Godzilla box set by the way... 30 dvds and a cool bust... amazing...

anyway, there were a couple things I liked about THE FOG remake, but it suffers from the pg-13 rating. that they didnt include the rooftopsequence I guess was because you could never improve on that scene. The ending was a nice idea, but yeah, where was the explanation for that?
hard to tell if I would like it more if I havent seen the original... to make the set up of the original the secret that slowly gets revealed in the remake is not such a clever idea when everybody knows the original. so I found the quest for answers pretty tiresome...

still, it was watchable... could have been a lot worse, but frustrating as it could have been great!

romanD wrote:anyway, there were a couple things I liked about THE FOG remake, but it suffers from the pg-13 rating.

Like I said a few months ago, the PG-13 rating on the Fog remake shouldn't matter, because the original film has NO VIOLENCE IN IT!. If Carpenter's film were re-evaluated by the MPAA today, it'd get a PG-13 in a heartbeat. No squirting blood, no major profanities harsher than a few "damns" and a "****" or two, no nudity...was no one paying attention, or is whining about PG-13 remakes of R-rated 70's horror flicks just hardwired into geeks? Adding a ton of gore doesn't mean anything to anyone except subscribers to Fangoria magazine.

I didn't mean necessarily gore with it, it is just that a pg-13 movie rarely has the tension like an r-rated one. SEVEN for example has not really onscreen violence in it, still it is absolutely no movie for kids.

So far all the pg-13 remakes are not only toned down in the violence department, but also in the tension one. That's what I meant... with rapid fire editing you don't tone down anything, you just create confusion and or yawning (for example THE CAVE... the attacks are edited so wildly that you don't see anything and don't get scared by it... and that is done obviously to get a pg-13 rating...)

THE RING (us remake) is a rare execption where a pg-13 movie has a lot of tension...

on the other side there are some movies which build up like splattermovies, but then don't show anything... nobody needs that. If you don't want to show any violence you have to direct the movie differently in the first place (Resident Evil comes to my mind... or AvP).

and just because the original had no gore, doesn't mean the remake doesn't need some either. If the style and whatever is so different, then the one or the other needs some blood maybe...

also the pg-13 aspect seems to mean that always young, "hip" people have to be the actors... The Fog remake qualifies mostly as a teenie-horror-movie, the original is more for grown ups, don't you think? same with WHEN A STRANGER CALLS... there is a teenage babysitter in it, but still it is not a movie for 12year old kids... or am I wrong? I'd rather have a remake targeted at people my age than a kidfriendly pg-13 thing with bland teenies who can't act, with tension which only scares kids and absolutely no adult language, themes or even violence if needed...
that can even go down to the music, Wes Craven had to take out some of the score, because the mpaa said it is too scary! looking at who scores the stranger remake you can be sure that the score by this mv-hack won't even be a note as scary as the wonderful score for the original... and that might be because of a kid-friendly or even "hip"-score.

well... those are all the points which come along with a pg-13 rating... violence may be the last aspect of it.

no need to yell monty!