Well, I’ve always said, if you’re going to do a remake, make the remake different from the original, or else why bother. Nobody wants a retread, unless there’s a valid reason for it. Like, if special effects have progressed to a large degree, for example, or if…y’know, I can’t actually think of any other valid reason to remake a movie, if you’re just going to film the same movie over again. The godawful, embarrassing remake of PSYCHO is a perfect example of why retreads don’t work. Rob Zombie tried to make his HALLOWEEN different, and the parts of it that were different were just fine. The film just fell apart when it got to the parts that were redoing scenes John Carpenter had already done in the original film.
If you’re dealing with a foreign movie being made for an American audience, you can get away with it more if you change little other than the setting and the actors. LET ME IN isn’t much different from LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, and that’s for the best. THE RING isn’t radically different from RINGU. Will the upcoming Americanized version of TRAIN TO BUSAN, to be entitled THE LAST TRAIN TO NEW YORK and due in theaters in the spring of 2023, be much altered from its predecessor? Let’s hope not, considering any attempts to tamper with the formula would likely result in an inferior reproduction.
