Re-Animated: Straw Dogs for Sale – Now with Skarsgård!

I’m not one of these vehement purists who believe that movies are sacrosanct, bemoaning any and every “blasphemous” attempt to re-make/re-model the movies of days gone by, not even when said “days gone by” were fairly recent (read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Sure, there are some movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t think should be re-made–Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Easy Rider, Jaws, etc.–but I’ll live if they are. That being said, I’m very interested in seeing the upcoming re-make of Sam Peckinpah‘s controversial classic, Straw Dogs.

Re-Animated: If Dreams Came True

[Editor's note: Re-Animated is a new column devoted to remakes, some movies we'd like to see and some we wish Hollywood would leave to rest in peace.]

In the world today it seems that very few people are coming up with new ideas for movies. Which is fine, there is an end point to all creative endeavors. So what do we do? We pick ourselves up, dust off some of our old favorites, and remake them with our newfangled CGI and color film and lady directors. Woohoo! Wait, wait, something horrible just happened. We chose all the wrong movies to remake. Like a bad techno cover of a beloved 80’s dance album, these terrible remakes keep on coming and fewer people even bother seeing the original. Now we’re even remaking startlingly recent films so that we don’t have to know how to read to see a movie (e.g. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Let The Right One In) But what about movies that need to be remade? There is a wonderful, beautiful, and much undernoted wealth of movies that could use a little modern charm. Let us start with an example.