cure Tagged Articles at Cinematical

(All this month we'll be bringing back some of our favorite Halloween-themed posts, as well as digging up some brand new stuff from beyond the grave. Enjoy!)

By: Peter Martin

"The answer is not in the avoidance of remakes. The plain fact is that remakes of very good original films sometimes fail because they have not been remade by people as talented as those who made the first versions." -- David O. Selznick, 1956.

The famed producer of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca was on a downward slide when he wrote the above in a memo to the president of 20th Century Fox. Selznick spent much of the 1950s repackaging and selling his earlier productions to studios, pocketing tidy fees for his efforts. The modern-day equivalent is Roy Lee. As explained in a profile in The New Yorker: "What Lee does for a living sounds simple enough, but no one in Hollywood had thought of it before. He watches videos of every Asian movie ever made, picks the biggest hits, and then, on behalf of their Asian distributors, sells the 'remake rights' of those films to studios here, so that they can be turned into big-budget American spectacles."

That article was published in June 2003, on the heels of the financial success of The Ring in the fall of 2002 but before the coming horror onslaught that included The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Dark Water and The Ring Two (all involving Lee), plus Pulse and others. Lee quickly expanded into other countries and other genres, but the most appealing remake target for Hollywood in general remains Asian horror. This year has seen the release of One Missed Call (Japan), The Eye (Hong Kong/Thailand), and Shutter (Thailand); awaiting release are The Uninvited (AKA A Tale of Two Sisters, South Korea), and The Echo (the Philippines), with Alone (Thailand), The Ring 3 and The Grudge 3 all listed in various stages of production on Lee's upcoming slate.

Certain movies get under my skin and refuse to leave. Case in point: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse (AKA Kairo). There are several startling scenes in those movies that left me on edge for days. Both are horror flicks, but differ in their approaches. Cure is a police procedural with an unsettling string of deaths, while Pulse imagines what happens when there is no more room in the spirit realm for dead people. Kurosawa has a gift for creating indelible imagery married to sometimes head-scratching stories. Even when things don't really add up, as in Bright Future, his films leave a distinct aftertaste.

Kurosawa's Retribution, from 2006, hit Region 1 DVD earlier this week, and it's an odd little beast. In the opening scene, a woman in a red dress is brutally drowned by a mysterious man in a shallow pool of salt water on a reclaimed piece of land near the ocean. Kôji Yakusho (Babel, Shall We Dance?) plays Yoshioka, a weary police detective (similar to the one he played in Cure) investigating the case. Before he can get too far, we witness a respected doctor kill his son, for little apparent reason, by the same method. Is the doctor a serial killer? Why are Yoshioka's fingerprints on the first victim's body? Why does Yoshioka start having nightmares about a woman in a red dress?

Deliberately paced, Retribution veers between an effective freak-out and a disappointing, frustrating mystery, but Kurosawa fans may want to check out its low-key artistic despair.

"The answer is not in the avoidance of remakes. The plain fact is that remakes of very good original films sometimes fail because they have not been remade by people as talented as those who made the first versions." -- David O. Selznick, 1956.

The famed producer of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca was on a downward slide when he wrote the above in a memo to the president of 20th Century Fox. Selznick spent much of the 1950s repackaging and selling his earlier productions to studios, pocketing tidy fees for his efforts. The modern-day equivalent is Roy Lee. As explained in a profile in The New Yorker: "What Lee does for a living sounds simple enough, but no one in Hollywood had thought of it before. He watches videos of every Asian movie ever made, picks the biggest hits, and then, on behalf of their Asian distributors, sells the 'remake rights' of those films to studios here, so that they can be turned into big-budget American spectacles."

That article was published in June 2003, on the heels of the financial success of The Ring in the fall of 2002 but before the coming horror onslaught that included The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Dark Water and The Ring Two (all involving Lee), plus Pulse and others. Lee quickly expanded into other countries and other genres, but the most appealing remake target for Hollywood remains Asian horror, with The Echo (the Philippines), Shutter (Thailand), The Eye (Hong Kong/Thailand), A Tale of Two Sisters (South Korea), Alone (Thailand), The Ring 3 and The Grudge 3 all listed in various stages of production on Lee's upcoming slate alone.

Lee has an eye for good films -- the titles include several of my recent Asian horror faves -- and some of the remakes have involved the original creative talent, but horror needs a strong personality at the helm, and too often the Hollywood studio machinery has softened and homogenized what made the originals so distinctive. So why not go back and watch the originals? Or try others I've written about before (Audition, Freeze Me, Koma, Memento Mori, Alone), or seek out the ones I've gathered below. Some are harder to find than others, but all represent dangerous visions that are carried out with flare. Why not share your favorites in the comments section?