Body Snatchers (1993)

Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers has proved a remarkably robust novel. Each generation of film-makers seems to see its own concerns reflected in Finney’s tale of alien takeover; the 1956 film was basically all about the cold war, the 1978 adaptation poked fun at narcissism and pseudo-spirituality, and this 1993 version is… a teen movie. It doesn’t sound massively promising on paper, but in fact director Abel Ferrara (best known for the notorious Driller Killer slasher flick) uses the original plot to take a subtle and sober look at the crushing loneliness and isolation of adolescence. Gabrielle Anwar gives a nicely understated performance as Marty Malone, a teenage girl who reluctantly spends her life on the road with her father, who inspects military bases for their chemical safety, her step-mother and her younger step-brother. She already feels frozen out of her dad’s new family, but when one airbase become infected by alien pods which turn humans into emotionless ‘pod people’, she quickly realises that she has very few people she can turn to… Read more

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Generally speaking, I’m not a movie purist when it comes to remakes - to my mind, there’s no reason why a good director can’t pull something fresh and interesting out of a familiar story. Even though the original is still held in high esteem, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in which four survivors attempt to ride out a plague of zombies in a deserted shopping mall, is particularly ripe for retelling. When the original first opened in 1978, shopping malls were a relatively new proposition - hulking, vacuum-formed consumer paradises that seemed to embody the the retail culture of the future. Fast forward to 2004 and the situation’s just as Romero predicted, only much much larger - there’s a mall in every city, and a generation of babies who can recognise the McDonalds logo before they can say “mummy”. You’d think there’s a fascinating survival story to be told there, and there probably is, but director Zack Snyder’s none too interested in telling it; his Dawn of the Dead pays lip service to the original (title, mall, original cast cameos) but is essentially a slick but soulless major-studio action movie of the kind that Hollywood knocks out by the bucketload. It ticks all the requisite boxes for a summer blockbuster, but ultimately fails to live up to its potential. Read more

The Ring (2003)

The story goes that two Dreamworks execs sat down to watch Hideo Nakata’s Ring quite early in the morning, and they were so impressed by what they saw that by lunchtime they had managed to secure the rights to remake it. Amazingly, for a big-budget Hollywood remake of an independent, low-budget Japanese film, a lot of that passion and excitement for the original actually shows through in the finished product. The Ring, as we are meant to call it now, occasionally misfires, and is inevitably victim to a certain level of major-studio cackhandedness, but on the whole it does an admirable job of bringing the story to a wider audience. Read more

The Ring Two (2005)

Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard not to view The Ring Two as being a crushing disappointment. This follow-up to the US remake of the Japanese classic (you may need to draw a diagram to follow that) was passed over by several directors until it ended up in the hands of Hideo Nakata, the Japanese director who brought us the original Ring. Considering that the US film itself wasn’t too shabby, you could be forgiven for getting excited by this; unfortunately, The Ring Two is almost guaranteed to shake your faith in both the versatility of the original concept and in Nakata’s abilities as a director. Read more