Gore Verbinski Will Be the Man Behind 'The Host' Remake
Filed under: Comedy, Foreign Language, Horror, Deals, Scripts, Remakes and Sequels
There have been murmurs of a sequel, but what about an English language remake for the insanely awesome Korean horror flick, The Host (Gwoemul)? (Come on, you know it was inevitable.) Variety reports that Universal is teaming up with Gore Verbinski to bring Bong Joon-ho's horror insanity stateside. But don't worry about this turning into Pirates of the Caribbean. Commercial director Fredrik Bond is making the jump to the big screen to helm the remake, with Smart People scribe Mark Poirier penning the script.It sounds like they're going for the same scenario -- toxins from a military base flow into a river and create "a giant mutant squidlike creature" (or tadpole!). The creature hits land, steals a little girl, and her "dysfunctional family" must team up to save her.
Do we need it? No. The original cast and crew did an amazing job and made one of the funniest horror movies that I've seen in years. But we're going to get it. So now we have to decide: Would we want it to be as similar to the original as possible, or should Poirier go wild with the script so that it doesn't look anything like Gwoemul? I'm leaning towards the latter -- there's no way he can top the original, and a lot of the strangeness and jokes just won't translate.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-19-2008 @ 10:44AM
Peter Hall said...
I've always stood that an Americanization of The Host absolutely must take place in a post-Katrina New Orleans with a distinctive New Orleans family. That would be daring and original, though, so it doesn't have a chance in hell of happening.
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11-19-2008 @ 10:52AM
monstermac said...
Yes.
Such as the sludge coming from an AMERICAN military base on foreign soil.
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11-19-2008 @ 11:05AM
monstermac said...
Speaking of which.
They could do that from the opposite viewpoint - of the bumbling Beetle Bailey-esque Military dunderheads who just took a crap on somebody else's country that way again. It could be a satire on them Bush Co.'s belligerant foreign relations with other people, and the extent they make their people on field ignore the damage they'd been steadily abetting - even as it blows up in everyone's faces as some giant frigging 50 some foot abomination squid. We'll see.
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11-19-2008 @ 12:00PM
Flonne said...
I'll say this - speaking for myself:
I do not want this particular remake. I saw the original and loved everything about it. It was a great movie (my favorite thing being the dysfunctional family), and I really have no hope for the remake being any good.
*sigh*
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11-19-2008 @ 1:45PM
Brian said...
I must be the only one that saw this movie and was left being very unsatisfied.
I just thought that the movie lacked everything. There wasn't enough scares to make it a horror movie. The monster wasn't really threatening enough to be a good monster movie. The politics were too much in the background to be a political statement. The family wasn't really all that engaging. It wasn't suspenseful. There were too many plot holes, and added characters that were cardboard and didn't add to the story. The movie took itself too seriously to be a B-movie, yet didn't have enough umph to be considered a true high cost studio pick.
I don't know, maybe I was just expecting something else, but I really didn't like the original, so I don't really want to see an American remake. I think Cloverfield did a fine job doing the monster movie thing, and this would be looked at as too much of a copy cat.
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11-20-2008 @ 6:28AM
MCW said...
Dead on. The Host comes up short on every level. I cringed at the thought of a remake, because it can only get worse, but then again, the original had so much effort and money put into that monster that the story and characters suffered. Plain and simply, the storytelling was weak. Cloverfield did blow it out of the water... literally.
At least The Host 2 will be out soon enough, so you can check it out and compare. Maybe there will be a new monster in it... would be better to have multiple creatures rather than one, if the whole ocean is contaminated, wouldn't that make sense?
11-19-2008 @ 2:33PM
ICON! said...
greeeaaaaattttt...ANOTHER remake of a great Asian movie...the American audience in general is lazy,ignorant, and uncultured when it comes to the world, outside their borders. They want a simplified version of everything. So the studio exects feed into the need of these instant gratification neanderthals (knowing that they will make a killing) by dumbing down the plot , and giving it a more generic, audience friendly version with sub-par dialogue, over done CGI, and uninspiring actors. It makes me sick that a high percentage of people in the states won't even see a foriegn film simply because they will have pay attention and read subtitles, they will instead wait for the dvd and watch the dubbed version. They will indeed change everything from the original and inturn it will lose its soul and just not feel the same. with that being said, they will probaly cast Will Smith, and the thing will be a success. While the audience of 16-24 yr olds will rave about how "That shit was off the chain", i will at least have my own gratification knowing that i saw a version that was far better several years earlier.
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11-20-2008 @ 1:29AM
monstermac said...
Like Zach Snyder's " Watchmen ".
Very lame already.