I generally don’t care about remakes. They are what they are, and sometimes – see Cronenberg’s The Fly and Carpenter’s The Thing – they’re better than the originals.
But the very concept behind Warner Bros’ proposed remake of Creepshow is sort of baffling. The original, directed with wonderfully cartoony flair by George Romero and based off the maddeningly hard to find comic book by Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson, is a cheesy yet weirdly effective classic. It’s also an anthology film, which befits anything that is based in part on the old EC horror comics of the 50s, as those titles were anthology titles.
Now Warner Bros wants to revisit the film but remove the anthology aspect and make it more like Doug Liman’s Go – the characters and stories will be intertwined and interconnected. That’s just lame.
Of course this is just the early stages of the film’s life – there is no director or writer as of now, just like 14 producers, and they’re probably all getting boners from seeing how impossibly well The Fog did this weekend considering that it’s the cinematic version of herpes.
Meanwhile there’s some Creepshow 3 under way, with stories that have nothing to do with Stephen King and, by all indications, filmmaking that has nothing to do with talent. They do have a pretty weird publicity campaign, though, which is to mostly say "fuck you" to people who think their movie looks stupid.