I've never been a real big fan of movie remakes, I'd prefer to see new stories rather than revamp existing ones and it doesn't help that with precious few exceptions the remakes are usually vastly inferior to the original version.
Despite knowing this I tend to eventually see remakes of movies I enjoyed even though I'm fairly certain I'll be disappointed by them and over the last couple of days I've seen the recent remakes of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Friday the 13th remake was interesting in that it really wasn't a remake of Friday the 13th but it seemed to be more of a loose remake of Friday the 13th Parts 2 and 3 with a very brief recap of the final confrontation between a teenage girl and Pamela Voorhees where Pamela is killed and this is witnessed by her son Jason, the movie moves forward in time and Jason has become the silent killing machine we are all familiar with and a group of campers are quickly dispatched and the viewer is introduced to another group of characters and the it all starts to fall apart.
I actually enjoyed the first 10-15 minutes of the movie but then I was introduced to another group of characters and I didn't really like any of them so I just didn't care when they were killed off, it was all pretty routine movie making and even the deaths were uninspired, overall a disappointing movie made all the more disappointing bu the fact it started out well and then just fell apart in front of your eyes.
The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was just like the pretty blonde that was killed off by Freddy during the movie, easy to look at but lacking any substance, this remake was technically well made, it looked great and some of the transitions between the real and dream worlds were really well done but there was just something lacking from the proceedings, I've certainly seen worse movies but this was just bland.
I did think it was interesting that for the remake they went with a more realistic burn makeup for Freddy, personally I didn't really like it but I thought it was an interesting choice, because of all the makeup involved this is one film where you could get away with keeping the actor from the original version of the movie and I think that might have improved things somewhat, I had no interest in seeing the camp humor of some of the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies but I do think it might have been fun to see Robert Englund return to the role he created.
So there you have it, two more disappointing remakes, I didn't think either of them was as bad as I'd heard but I have no desire to see either movie again.
