Regular Columns

With The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee became the new kings of British horror, and their frequent co-starring roles made them a tandem the likes of which the industry hadn’t seen since the heyday of the Karloff-Lugosi double-threats of the late-30's. Their films for Hammer and Amicus have long been fan faves, but the film I’m going to sing the praises of here doesn’t have quite the same profile as the likes of Horror of Dracula. Most horror fans of a certain vintage no...doubt have a soft spot for it, but for the few out there who haven’t had the pleasure yet, allow me to direct your attention to Eugenio Martín’s Horror Express (1972).

At the turn of the 20th Century, anthropologist Lee finds, in the mountains of China, what for all the world looks like a dark-haired abominable snowman frozen in ice. He loads his jealously guarded prize onto the Trans-Siberian Express, much to the curiosity of rival scientist Cushing. It turns out the creature isn’t dead, and it also turns out it can pick locks and has other useful skills, as it absorbs the knowledge of whoever meets its eyes. Unfortunately for those individuals, their brains are boiled away. The apeman is inhabited by an alien life force, which soon transfers itself first to one human being, then another.

Remaking cult movies is a risky proposition. By their nature, they are going to have a rabidly loyal fan base, and therefore the people most likely to be interested in the remake are also the people most likely to be hostile towards it. This is the lesson being learned the hard way by Neil LaBute. His remake of 1973's The Wicker Man is in the theatres now. He faced a barrage of criticism from the fans even before he’d finished his work. He’s unlikely to hear anything different now. Both films tell a similar st...ry of a police officer arriving in a remote island community to look for a missing girl, only to find that everyone is in on some kind of conspiracy. But the storytelling is where LaBute falls down.

Remakes can certainly be worthwhile, especially if they take the original premise in a new direction. Thus, the new versions of The Thing and The Fly became classics in their own right. LaBute, unfortunately, has simultaneously been too faithful to his source, and betrayed it. How he has done so is by misunderstanding what made the original work so well, and then, having destroyed its soul, kept a lot of the original dialogue. This is called being true to the letter, and not the spirit.

Back in the sixties, Gamera was Godzilla’s poor, trailer-trash cousin. This flying, fire-breathing turtle (but of course!) gallumphed his way through a series of films. The first, under its North American release title Gammera the Invincible (the one time there was a double “m” in the name), is a pretty decent monster flick for that period, with some fine destruction, and introduces Gamera’s fondness for children (so though he trashes cities, he can’t be all bad). US-shot scenes were added to the original, and...the producers seem to have gone out of their way to find a Japanese actor whose mispronunciation of English was as stereotypical as possible (as his every “l” becomes an “r,” imagine how he utters the line, “Our fuel supplies are dangerously low”). The subsequent films degenerated almost immediately into full-on juvenilia. Most of these films are available in one form or another (none fabulous) from various budget labels. Check the bins at Wal-Mart.

Flash-forward to 1995. After a long hiatus, the turtle came back in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. And everything changed. Where before the Gamera pics were hard-pressed to live up to even the weakest of the Godzilla movies, now the situation was reversed. Director Shusuke Kaneko here began a trilogy that set a new high watermark for giant monster movies. Gamera is now the creation of a lost civilization, and his mission is to defend the Earth against whatever might threaten it. In this case, the threat is the flying monster Gyaos, though it could almost as easily have been humanity. There are scenes of stunning pictorial beauty, and the monster battles are as thrilling as the child in you remembers the fights being in the older Godzilla flicks. One scene in particular (involving a failed missile attack on Gyaos) was stolen holus bolus by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich for their misbegotten Godzilla (1998), but rendered nonsensical.