Remakes That Suck

I've made peace with the whole remake thing. Really I'm ok with it at this point, nothing is scared. Out of curiosity it was interesting to see what someone would do with a familiar story that I loved. It's been said before but this is the worst of the worst, well at least somewhere in the bottom 5 of totally incompetant remakes. None of the recent batch have been great but for a reference point I've enjoed the Dawn, Chainsaw and Hills remakes. I was entertained for an hour and a half.

The original Fog is a very simple, well crafted film. Being in a thick fog bank is a universaly scary concept. Add murderous ghosts with glowing eyes to the pea soup fog bang and it's horrific.

Now with the remake we have an actual fog bank that can toss people around and make bad things happen to people. The filmmakers clearly missed the point because that's not really scary at all, it's just unfortunate. Toss in a cheesy backstory and it's now unfortunate and boring.

Now back to the original, it maintained some boundries. The fog showed up but if you could avoid the creepy-as-hell ghosts that wanted to kill you, there was a chance of survival. So by establishing those boundries Carpenter was able to maintain some suspsense. On top of that the general public maintains at least a basic fear of ghosts and that something like this, while way out there, could possibly happen the next time a nasty fog bank showed up in town.

Now the rebooted Fog has no boundries or laws. It just shows up, can pull you into a drain or toss a randomly discarded knife at someone. While on paper that might have read as more interesting it sure was boring as hell on the screen. It's like having a random tornado show up, suck up a character or two and move onto the next. Not really scary, just odd and unfortunate for the characters that get sucked up. I just am shocked that all the money and people that are involved in these productions, how could they all miss the very basic point as to why their source material worked?