The Addendum Reboot

I’ve talked before about the problems with sequels and my displeasure with reboots. Today I want to talk about three recent “reimaginings” that add a whole new level of error to the remake industry. These unimaginings commit the sin of sucking the life out of the material they are remaking and then filling in the holes with pure filler. They are like addendums more than films. Specifically, I’m talking about: Halloween (2007), Final Destination (2009), and A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010). Blech.

The originals of these three films were all standout horror films over the past thirty years. Halloween (1978) essentially invented the slasher genre when it gave us Michael Myers, a silent, masked killing machine who returns to his childhood home to kill off every fornicating teenager he can find. Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) upped the stakes for slasher films by improving both the special effects and the level of creativity of these films with the introduction of Freddie Krueger, who kills fornicating teenagers in their dreams. And Final Destination (2000) injected a bit of Rube Goldbergism into the teen horror genre by forcing the teens to solve a series of mystery puzzles while death hunts them for wrongly escaping their destinies. . . and thereby kept them too busy to fornicate.

Each of these films spawned a bazillion sequels and each should have been pretty decent as reboots because they all offered excellent source material to work with. In fact, all you really had to do to make good reboots out of these would be take the original idea, modernize a few elements, come up with a new take on some aspect of the film, hire a bunch of teen hotties, and start rolling. Sounds easy, but apparently not.

Final Destination 2.0 is horrible and pointless. It's like a Cliff's Notes version of the original that misses the key points. The original Final Destination was an earnest teen horror flick which paid off in the clever and interesting riddles the teens needed to solve to save their sorry butts. They had to figure out why they were being killed off one at a time, in what order they would die, how to spot when death when it came for them, and how to cheat death. All of this involved a good deal of creativity and made the film interesting. Adding to this solid base, death would try to kill them in Rube Golbdberg-like ways which kept the audience guessing how each scene would actually play out.

The unimagining, however, makes a fatal error right out of the gates. It assumes you’ve seen the original and you don’t want to see the characters cover the same ground you already know. Thus, it gives a momentary nod to the parts of Final Destination that made the film so interesting as the characters self-consciously read summary-type lines that translate into “you know what’s going on,” before it jumps into the elaborate death scenes. But these scenes feel meaningless with no story attached to them. . . it's like listening only to song hooks. What’s worse, to hide the missing plot, they made the death scenes much more elaborate. . . which is like listening to 10 minute remixes of song hooks. Whereas the death scenes in the original gave you maybe a 30 second set up with a few twists and turns and no guarantee of how the scene would end, the new film gives 4-5 minute set ups with precise breakdowns of exactly what to expect. This gets old fast.

Nightmare on Elm Street 2.0 does something similar, only worse. This time they not only skipped the plot except for minor references to it, they added no new elements -- they even repeated some of the death scenes. Basically, this film offers a stripped down version of the original with new actors. In fact, the only thing that was noticeably different was the annoying dialog, which seems to have been stolen from other films without context or thought. I’m sure the writer would call this an homage if questioned by the writing police, but it sure felt like they thought they could just randomly take lines from other movies to fill in their own gaps.

Finally, we have Halloween 2.0, which actually tried to add something to the original film: a backstory for the Michael Myers character. But sadly, the backstory they offered was not only pathetic, but actually harmed the very essence of the film. What made the original Myers so creepy was his silent, relentless way of killing without purpose or emotion. We had no idea why he did what he did except that Donald Pleasance warned us that he was pure evil, and that made him interesting. The unimagining wipes all of this out by telling us that poor Myers is a victim of child abuse. Boo hoo hoo. And like that, a horror movie morphs into an afternoon special. Having neutered its monster, the film then adds nothing else new or interesting and leaves us with the distinct impression they only bothered copying half of the already very-thin original material.

Here’s the thing. . . if you’re going to remake a film, you need a reason. There has to be some element of the film you think can result in an order of magnitude improvement or that takes the series in a wholly new, unexpected direction. These films never understood that. Halloween 2.0’s big addition could have been done in a single line of lame dialog, and even then never should have been done. The other films not only added nothing, but they actively took away everything that made those films watchable. And none of these films grasps that a reboot must stand on its own, i.e. you can't just self-consciously point to the original and tell the audience "hey, you know the plot. . . and stuff." Even a lousy movie like Barb Wire (1986) understood this and turned out much better than it deserved to be because it knew enough to keep the portions of the original material (Casablanca), that everyone liked before it tried to add to those. This should be obvious!

So how do we explain these three films? I'm thinking the answer lies in a lack of respect for the audience. I'm thinking the filmmakers figured their audience was too riddled with Attention Deficit Disorder to sit through a remake, so they created Addendums instead of remakes, i.e. "films" that offer little more than a collection of new scenes to be watched in conjunction with your knowledge of the original material rather than films that stand on their own. Pathetic.

Please stop doing this.