Movie Night! 'Remake/Reboot' Edition

Where do you stand on the whole 'remake/reboot movie' question? It won't surprise you to learn that I'm somewhere in the middle ;o) On the one hand, of course I want to see original movies or at the very least, see movies tackle source material that hasn't already been mined. On the other hand though, one of my all time favourite movies is a remake and I've got to say that, well... If you can improve on the original then why not? And yes, the 2004 version of 'Dawn of the Dead' is a very different movie but I still think that it does a lot of stuff better than the original. Hang on, I'm off on a tangent again... :o)

After watching 'Child's Play' the other day, I thought I'd give the 'remake/reboot' a go and see if and how well it held up to the original. And while I was at it, I found a DVD of the 'Fright Night' remake lurking in a TBR pile and figured why not give that a shot too while I was there. And that was exactly what I did. Let me tell you about them...


'Child's Play' (2019)

This remake of a horror classic (well it is) takes the approach of taking out all the supernatural elements, of the original, and going for a regular 'AI gone mad' plot instead and you know what? I thought it worked really well. There's still plenty of room for the gory kills, the creepy 'hunted' moments and a couple of really good jump scares. What I really liked though was how the film makes you look at Chucky in a whole different way. There's no evil in him originally but his innocent world view, and AI logic, leads him to make all the wrong choices and that's where he ends up. Which leads me to think that this is possibly the first 'Child's Play' movie where you can't help but feel a little sorry for him; poor little toy never stood a chance, even though he should never have killed all those people to be fair...

The only bit that had me wondering was that Andy trashed his flat and his Mum... Took him to work with her? Not quite sure of the reasoning behind that but it did lead into that finale so I'll let it slide for now. 'Child's Play' wasn't a bad remake at all, it spun the original plot enough to catch my interest and it hit most of the targets that it was aiming for. It's child's play really... ;o) Sorry, couldn't help myself.


'Fright Night' (2011)

The one thing that I kept on thinking, watching this, was that if Anton Yelchin was still with us, he would have been a superb Peter Parker in the MCU, don't you think?

But I was there for the film so I kept on with that, even though this one wasn't a patch on the original. Whereas the original was properly creepy, this iteration of 'Fright Night' seemed to decide to get all the creepy stuff done early and turn the rest of the movie into car chases and vampire fights which didn't work for me (although to be fair, maybe that's just my preference for creepy terror rather than the film doing anything wrong, it just didn't grip me).

David Tennant being a slightly swearier version of Doctor Who was a nice touch but not quite enough for me, I can't see myself searching out the sequel.

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