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So we’ve had plenty of horror remakes, and we’ll continue to have plenty more. Most, as we know, are at best middling, at worst utter desecrations of the originals. We have had some cases where a remake might actually make sense, cases where the first film could certainly do with some improvement. Amityville Horror, I’m looking at you. And yet somehow, that remake managed to be worse. The job is made easier for the upcoming Friday the 13th retread, since the original, despite its iconic status, is nothing more than hackwork, and I say that with love. But the current offering, and today’s topic, is the 3D return to My Bloody Valentine.

Now, I have a great deal of fondness for the original, not all of which is Canadian pride in a homegrown product. There’s a nice, gritty atmosphere and setting, the killer is well designed, and the murders (truncated though they originally were -- all hail the  restored release!) are inventive. But let’s not kid ourselves, either. This ain’t Bergman. This is no holy text.

Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows (1976) isn’t the most high-profile Italian horror film, and only landed a legit North American release with Image's 2002 DVD release. But it has been a succès d’estime for quite some time, particularly in its homeland, and it is well worth tracking down. Viewers looking for something fast-paced, or a Lucio Fulci-style gorefest will be disappointed, but those willing to work with it will find a deeply atmospheric, disturbing and intelligent contemporary gothic with elements of the giallo.

Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is an art restorer who arrives in an out-of-the-way village to rescue a damaged church fresco depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He is initially very impressed by the artist’s ability to capture pain, but the more he uncovers of the painting, and the more works by the deceased artist he sees, the more disturbed he is by the man’s obsessive depictions of cruelty and death. When a friend of his, who claims something terrible is happening in the village, is killed, Stefano is drawn further and further into a deadly mystery, at whose centre lies the impulse behind these gruesome images.

I have, for work-related reasons, been watching quite a number of European horror films in close succession, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. Yesterday, in the middle of this, I was moved to reflect on what seems to be a fairly significant difference between the British and Continental films. I won't go so far as to claim that what I'm going to describe is universal, but it is prevalent enough to be, at the very, very least, a marked trend. And it is this: that the Continental variant has a distinctly sleazier feel than do its cousins.

Now, sleaze is an extremely subjective term. How, precisely, does one define it? This is not the place to attempt to answer such a weighty question, but I do feel I should remind my patient reader that, in these quarters, the term is frequently not pejorative, but often a mark of the highest praise. Furthermore, as I said above, this isn't a universal law. England's Pete Walker has pumped out a body of work that is emphatically sleazy, as is evident from the titles alone: House of Whipcord, Die Screaming Marianne , The Flesh and Blood Show, and so on. But his films, memorably described by Kim Newman as “defiantly grotty,” stand out as such because they are, relatively speaking, the exception that proves the rule. Hammer is, of course, the paradigm for British horror, and as prurient as some of its later offerings  would become (Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, To the Devil a Daughter), there was always an aura of polished respectability about the films. Whereas on the Continent, the films were notably far more sexualized, to the point, at times, of completely erasing the line between porn and horror. Thus, people like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco would move back and forth between making outright hardcore and more traditional genre fare.

Some movies have “cult” written all over them. But that can actually be counterproductive. If the psychotronic audience sense the film is trying too hard to be a cult epic, then it risks rejection. In this context, I’m not quite sure what to think of Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks Except Japan (2006).

Kawasaki is a filmmaker who is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. His work is gradually becoming available to North American audiences, with such titles as The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala leading the pack (and those titles are not metaphors – they literally describe the main characters). I confess to being very curious to see what he does with his recent revival of Guilala (in The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit) – surely the giant monster that the fewest people have been clamoring to see again. The World Sinks Except Japan is another film whose title precisely describes the central concept. When everywhere else drops beneath the waves, Japan is flooded with refugees from the rest of the world. Result: Americans reduced to service sector jobs, Chinese and Korean leaders suddenly becoming lapdogs to the Japanese Prime Minister, caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis play-act action scenes for chump change, and so on.

First, let me wish my fellow site scribes and whoever might be reading this the best of the season. Now I should turn to the painful task of following up my speculative piece a couple of weeks ago about what might go wrong with the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a blockbuster whose success is so anemic that, a few years from now, it will certainly have lapsed into sufficient obscurity that whatever profile it might still have will be the result of masochists voluntarily subjecting themselves to its inanities. It will, in other words, have become a cult film, but of the sort where the cult’s loyalty is the loyalty of absolute contempt.

My concern leading up to seeing the film was that the need to provide big-bang FX would overwhelm the story itself. In this, I was both right and wrong. Yes, the grand spectacle is saved up for the end of the film, but as spectacles go, it isn’t all that impressive. And there is enough flash during the rest of the film to keep those jonesing for eye candy satiated. Keanu Reeves, meanwhile, acquits himself honorably as Klaatu, quite convincingly coming across as an alien in a human body. Where the film fails, and fails in jaw-dropping manner, is at the level of the script.