My Complicated feelings about the 2014 TMNT Remake

So a few days ago I saw the first trailer for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) film and I have to say it left me a little conflicted.

Here's the thing; I grew up with the Ninja Turtles, I read the classic comics, watched the show, owned the toys, played the role-playing game and felt solidly betrayed by TMNT III: Turtles in Time - so let's just say I've been there, I know of what I speak and I come from a place where I can say I'm a big fan, it holds a special place in my childhood and even through I may not have liked every iteration of TMNT, for the most part I'm on board.

Now we get the new trailer, promising us a sleeker, more up-to-date look at the turtles, and I ask myself - do we need this?  I mean, I'm a big fan of movies, and I dedicated a whole month to reimaginings of older movies a few years back so it's not like I feel that reexamining a title has no merit.

But the Turtles?  My heroes on a half shell?

I honestly don't know how to feel about this.  True, I was in a similar place back in 1990 when the first live-action TMNT film came out, and I left the theatre promising myself that I would have the lyrics to Turtle Power down by heart within the week, but I was 14-years-old when that movie came out.

I'm just not sure I have love for another iteration of Turtle film in me.

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Eighteen

The Inevitable Wizard of Oz Crossover

The story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
– L. Frank Baum in his Introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (1900)

It’s strange to think that this was the sentiment behind the story that became the film that gave me nightmares as a child. The Wicked Witch of the West, the flying monkeys and the initial “floating head” version of the Wizard shown in the 1939 MGM motion picture each worked effectively as nightmare batter for my young mind, and as a young boy with bad eyes from the start, very familiar with lengthy and painful eye examinations, Dorothy’s question to the estheticians in the Emerald City “…Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?” resonated with me in a way I’m certain was not the intent of the original author.

So In Hack/Slash #14: Over the Rainbow, Cassie and Vlad are attempting to track down a Slasher who is plaguing the film set of a remake of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Now I’ll admit that at first glance perhaps no one immediately thinks that a horror-based story is going to inevitably crossover with either the classic 1900 L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of OZ or the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of OZ. But to be fair, the story, and especially the MGM film have become so influential in popular culture that I’ve seen it prequelled, deconstructed and even had that deconstruction turned into a musical. It has also been referred to in everything from the popularity of the quote, to reimaginings, and even a reference in the horror film Saw II.

Also the 1985 film Return to OZ may have one of the most terrifying sequences I ever saw in a film as a child.

So adding a Slasher-twist to the story is, in my mind, nothing short of genius. The story follows both two women on the set running from the Slasher (who has possessed the productions Tin Man and speaks only in lyrics from the classic “If I Only Had a Heart”) and Cassie and Vlad as they race to the set to put an end to the Slasher himself.
IMAGE USED
Hack/Slash of Oz Alternate Cover.  Retrieved online from http://www.newkadia.com/?HackSlash_The_Series_Comic-Book-Covers=1111127128

To See or Not to See: The Evil Dead

Okay, I am a pretty big fan of The Evil Dead franchise; like most I began with the 1987 film Evil Dead 2, then went back to watch the 1981 original and watched the 1992 follow-up Army of Darkness in theatres.

Years later I used my love of the series to see how cool my wife was (answer – very cool), introduce my friends to something they hadn’t seen before (and the cool friends I showed it to still talk to me), and eventually even got to show the series to my youngest daughter as she began her own exploration of the horror genre (and for newcomers to my blog, relax, first I showed her scary kids movies, then scary movies from the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s – not the ‘70s though, because that decade in horror was messed up – I’m still not old enough to see a bunch of those movies).

So here I am, a huge fan of the franchise, when what do you know, a new version of The Evil Dead is about to be released in theatres.

So now I’m conflicted.  The original 1981 film is one of the freakiest horror films I’ve ever seen.  Seriously.  Both original sequels move away from straight horror into a bizarre horror/comedy hybrid (which I love as well), but that first film was just got under my skin and wouldn’t let go.

The new film has the blessing of the original producers, and the reviews so far have been pretty positive, but I’m still nervous that by revisiting my own childhood experiences with horror (until I saw The Evil Dead, my experience involved TV movies and the big franchisees of Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers – all of which (except for the original Halloween andElm Street films) did nothing to prepare me for how scary a movie like The Evil Dead could be.

Honestly, I’ll probably go see it (I talk about horror a lot, so my friends may start asking me what I thought of it, so I figure I should have some thoughts), but I’m gonna be pretty careful with my expectations.  Speaking as a guy who did a month-long study into re-imaginings of horror classics I know how well, and how poorly, these films can translate.

The Reimagining of Bookmonkey

Day One: Remakes versus Reimaginings.

This month at the Wisdom of Bookmonkey we are going to be looking at a recent phenomena of popular genre films, the remimagining. Before I begin reviewing the various films however, it is important to separate what I'm talking about when I say remimagining.

For ages, horror has been a genre of remakes; as both a character and a story, Dracula has been remade so many times that it is virtually impossible to simply say your favourite film is Dracula. Do you mean the Bela Lugosi one? How about Christopher Lee?

Personally, I don't mind remakes - the genre has had remakes since the beginning and it is interesting to see a new productions take on a classic tale.

For me the trouble comes with a recent trend in horror of remaking all the ones I grew up with as a child. I'm okay with films from the '40s, '50s, and '60s being remade, but as soon as you start looking at films that came out in the '70s you start hitting the films of my childhood. (all right to be fair I was born in '76 but as I grew up watching horror films from my local video store in the early '80s, so I grew up watching them late at night at home on video).

In 2003 a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released to less than stellar reviews but had a lot of folks checking it out in theatres and so the trend was born - the b-grade horror films of my youth have become grist for the mill and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

The thing about these newer films however, is that they are being billed as reimaginings, stories that take aspects of the original films but then try to tell stories of their own. Sometimes this works (not nearly as often as I would like) and sometimes it crashes into a waste of 90 minutes of my life, but for the next month we are going to visit almost a dozen of these films, and see how they stand up to the classics.

Welcome to...

The Reimagining of Bookmonkey.