On the list of crimes against cinema, the remake stands just above the sequel as an offense against the artform.
The sequel, of course, is an indicator of a dangerous loss of imagination, though there are those rare examples of sequels that do more than simply repeat the formula of the original film.
But the remake blends both a death of imagination with hubris -- not just that an old product can be resold in a new package but that no matter how classic the original, the re-maker can somehow improve upon it.
Not that there aren't remakes that work; people have been reworking Shakespeare and other classics for years. The best remakes reimagine the material in a way that brings new insight; I always point to The Magnificent Seven as an example of a remake that stands on its own.
Most remakes, however, are simply crassly commercial projects. Someone somewhere said, "Hey, this is available and no one's seen it in a while. Let's cash in." Exhibit A: The upcoming film of The A Team.
Which brings us to The Wolfman, which attempts to retell the story that originated with a 1941 film starring Lon Chaney Jr. that was called The Wolf Man. The Chaney film isn't a classic in the sense that James Whale's Frankenstein or Todd Browning's Dracula are, as a formal piece of cinema. It was a corny horror programmer that happened to star Claude Rains and the wonderfully named Maria Ouspenskaya.
But it's a classic in the sense that it has legs -- that it's the werewolf story that spawned all cinematic werewolf stories. There's always room for a new one -- and there's no need to retell this old one.
Still, to be fair, Joe Johnston's remake isn't dreadful -- certainly not as awful as the commercials make it look. It's not a good movie, by any stretch -- but it could have been a lot worse.
What it's got going for it is Johnston's willingness to go for the throat with the action -- literally. When the title character runs wild, he doesn't just bite people or claw them -- he defenestrates them, dismembers them, decapitates them -- and all the other dis- and de- words that have to do with horrible things that can happen to the human body.
And this Wolfman isn't selective: Once he's turned loose by a full moon, he's a little like the Tasmanian Devil in the Looney Tunes cartoons -- a one-man tornado of violence cutting a swath through the closest available crowd of humans, leaving a wake marked by gallons of fake blood and rubber guts and limbs.
This review continues on my website.
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Secondly, re: "The Chaney film isn’t a classic in the sense that James Whale’s 'Frankenstein' or Todd Browning’s 'Dracula' are, as a formal piece of cinema." No, Chaney's film (To me, forever, Curt Siodmak's film. He states in his autobiography, WOLF MAN'S MAKER, he was writing about people who were really wolves inside, like the Nazis he'd narrowly escaped.) is vastly SUPERIOR to Browning's DRACULA, which, after the great first 15 minutes, becomes a stultifying bore, a cinematic cure for insomnia. Whale's FRANKENSTEIN is a great movie, though still not as great as BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, a perfect example of a sequel that deepens the material too-glossed-over in the original, and is essential. FRANKENSTEIN is incomplete without BRIDE. Siodmak's WOLF MAN is a B-movie that looks like an A-fim, due to a first-rate cast.
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In your full review (How annoying to make us click to a different site to finish reading it) you wrote: "in fact, an actual full moon lasts, at most, two nights." This will be big news to every astronomer on earth, since full moons ONLY last ONE night! There is no such thing as a two-night full moon.
In Siodmak's film, the full moon has nothing to do with Chaney's changes. The moon is never seen nor mentioned. The full-moon tie-in began in the sequel, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN, in which the last line of the doggerel poem is altered to include the full moon. And yes, those movies often presented what they called "The Cycle of the Full Moon," which seems to last three nights. But the full moon is on ONE night each month. For a two-night full moon to happen the moon would have to halt in its orbit.
"Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May becoame a wolf when the wolfbane blooms,
And the autumn moon is bright."
In FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN, and in all thereafter, it becomes:
"Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May becoame a wolf when the wolfbane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright."
I can not believe you reviewed the new WOLF MAN and never mentioned if the verse is in the movie or not.
Frankly I prefer my blood and violence to come from werewolf movies - not from Quentin Tarantooty.
I saw The Wolfman last night at a preview screening in LA, and I liked it. I didn't expect it to be more than an entertaining popcorn movie, and it delivered in that regard. I thought the film editing was really good - it was fast and drove the film relentlessly. I also really liked the set and costume design, the aesthetic use of the lunar cycle as a framing device and the imaginative plot elements incorporating Gypsies and a lycanthropy origin in India.