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Posted by
zacharythax June 2, 2009 -
605 views
No way I can be the slightest bit objective on this one. Remaking LHOTL borders on sacrilige in my book. Why not repaint the Mona Lisa or remake Citizen Kane fer Crissakes! Like a train wreck from which you can't look away I just had to see this out of some masochistic urge.
I wanted to hate this slick, stylish, updated version of the ultra-infamous film that in the 80's was only available on a 5th generation dub from LA's Channel Z. Did I mention I succeeded?
The fact that the original was so hard to see for so long (it didn't come out officially on tape until 1989 due to David Hess' music rights being tied up in courts all those years--incidentally the same reason that Heavy Metal took forever to come out on tape. ) There were also all kinds of conflicting reports as to exactly what scenes of gore and brutality were contained in the original director's cut. One fanzine talked about "moonlit torture scenes" which were obviously the result of poor projection lighting strength at a drive in. (Movies at drive ins were always notoriously under-lit.) So before I even saw it the original had already attained a legendary status in my mind having imagined what this movie was like. I had heard you felt like you had to take a shower after seeing it and that it was like a grim gritty documentary.
I first imagined that they should remake this as a musical :
OOOOh! Piss your pants
Yess, Piss your pants.
I don't want to make you dance
Just want you to
Piss
your
pants!
As Weasel and Sadie tap dance in the background.
Well, no pants are pissed in this version. The only thing that gets pissed is the schmuck who paid $8 to see this in the theater but:
Mari Collingwood in a champion swimmer, her dad's a doctor and her mom in a smoking hot MILF who, unfortunately does NOT bite anyone's dick off. Mari takes off into the city to see her bad girl pal Paige, who for some reason is one of the few characters who has a different name in this. They should have called her Phyllis. They go to a motel and smoke pot with junior and hey, I was all disappointed. I was hoping we'd get to see the Bloodlust concert. I'll bet there actually is band named Bloodlust today. Hey there is! Screaming operatic metal. But not what you'd expect in 1972.
Krug and the gang show up and abduct Mary and her bad influence and take them up to right where she lives in an SUV. Paige pushes in the cigarette lighter and in a desperate jump for it, burns Sadie on the face. Sadie, by the way, is a million times better looking than Jeremy Rain, but with none of the humor or charm. In fact the bad guys have absolutely nothing likeable about them at all. They're just tattooed dumb thugs the kind you see every day (at least in my neighborhood.)
The SUV wrecks and Paige makes a break for it and gets nabbed right before she reaches help in the form of an inhabited industrial site. Krug stabs her but doesn't carve his initials. Then Mari is raped rear-entry. (I don't know how that got by the MPAA. Doggy style usually is death to an R rating but I guess they figure it's OK if it's rape. See the movie This Film is Not Yet Rated for more details on this super-secretive organization that decides what YOU can watch!)
Whoever make this was obviously familiar with the basic plot but completely oblivious to what make LHONTL great. It was supposed to be a treatise on the effects of violence on not only victim but the perpetrator. The original was made at the tail end of Vietnam and it seems like a chance was squandered somewhere here by making a visually appealing but basically personality-less (and humorless) film. It turns out that the first draft of the script was rewritten by some yo-yo who only saw the original ONCE (!)
Not only did this one gross on the order of $30 million but younger audiences would probably have a hard time sitting through the original. I was working in a video store when this Holy Grail of all exploitation came out for real. People brought it back saying, "That was stoooopid!" and then they'd turn around rent Wresltemania XXXV or a porn.
When people who aren't so bright (and believe me, that's most everyone where I grew up) see a movie that makes them feel uncomfortable but they just don't have the words to describe why they usually say, "That was stupid." I heard the same comments about Suspiria and Henry V.
Mari breaks away and swims across the lake. We see graceful underwater bullet tracings like in Saving Private Ryan. Krug misses the first 5 times but...BLAM a red hole right between her shoulder blades and an overhead crane shot as the blood blooms artistically out from her twisted waterlogged body.
Well it turns out that she doesn't die, we don't have the clever booby-traps or Krug telling Junior "Blow your brains out!" We do have (in an insane bypass of all built in factory fail-safe precautions) the Weasel character getting his hand in a garbage disposal and Krug's head exploding in a microwave.
Well, kids, I have to go and get on to remaking Last House on Dead End Street before Hollywood figures out a way to hopelessly fug THAT one up.
With Riki Lindhome of Gilmore Girls as Sadie.
