Genre Character of the Week: Tommy Jarvis

As a kid, I was a pretty big fan of the slash films of the late '70s and early '80s.  Maybe it was because I grew up in a house filled with women and wanted something I could claim was my own, maybe I just liked scary movies - regardless, before I finished high school I had done multiple marathon showings of all of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th films.  Although the Elm Street movies were always my favourite in terms of concept and the monster, my favourite good guy in any of the films was Tommy Jarvis, from Friday the 13th Part IV, V, and VI, but mostly from part four, when he was played by Corey Feldman(pictured right).

Here’s what I like about Tommy; he’s pretty much the perfect person to go up against Jason.  Unlike the crowds of soon-to-be dead teenagers who generally end up fighting and then getting killed by Jason, Tommy is a little kid, and when it comes to fighting a giant zombie-like killing machine, you don’t want soldiers, or police or jocks, you want a small child who can figure out how best to defeat the creature you are up against.

To be fair, I'm a little scared of revisiting any of the horror franchises from my youth, as they were pretty light on story, and pretty heavy on shock and gore.  But for some reason, the idea of beating an unstoppable zombie (although they later try to state that Jason was a demonically possessed person) with little kid psychology just really stuck with me.

Although as a character, Tommy returns in both part V and part VI - for me it will always be the youngest Tommy who was the coolest.

Things I've Noticed #8: Are Remakes giving up?

I just watched the trailer for the new "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie, due out next February and I noticed something pretty strange. Except for the opening bit where the parents of Elm Street burn Krueger alive, practically every single other shot in the whole thing was a direct steal from the original film.

Just as the '90s were filled with kid movie remakes (The Parent Trap, That Darn Cat, etc.), our current decade is full of horror remakes. The problem is this, if you have nothing new to say, why exactly are you saying anything?

I actually don't mind remakes - although I don't mind reading subtitles, a lot of people do and therefore the idea of taking a foreign film and remaking it for western audiences is all right by me, I'm even a pretty big fan of the horror remake, because when it is done well - John Carpenter's "The Thing" for example, it can actually add to the enjoyment of the original without simply being a shameless steal.

I think that Dark Castle Entertainment actually started out with a pretty good idea - remake b-movies from the 50s and 60s with better actors and bigger budgets. The key however is to stick with movies that can be remade without alienating their key audiences.

When the remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" came out, I wasn't excited, I was kind of pissed - the original 1951 film said everything so perfectly, what could a new movie do?The point of a remake is to take the original material and do something new with it, if you simply copy the original, but add a new word here or there, it's called plagiarism.

Now I'm not saying remakes should never happen, but at the very least they should show something different - and for the record, a higher gore level is not different - I mean something different with the story, or the theme, or characterization.

I remember being blown away back in 1998 by the idea that Gus Van Sant was going to remake, shot-by-shot Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and although the result was not great, at least you can say he was honest about what he was doing.