I am an old, old man…

Updated on March 19, 2010 By Ken Begg 14 Comments

…or so I deduce from reading that a) Jennifer Lopez will perhaps star in a remake of Overboard, a Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell movie made in 1987 (when I was 26), and that Paramount might be remaking Monster Squad, which also came out in 1987. Of course, remakes like this are more understandable when you do the math and realize that 1987 was 23 years ago.

Actually, a remake of Monster Squad isn’t that bad of an idea; I know the film has its fans, but I was never that big on it.  Certainly there’s room for improvement, although I realize how unlikely that is in actuality.  Indeed, I fear the film will be a big, overstuffed CGI fest and even more stupidly ‘huge’ than the previous one.  I do have one simple suggestion for an improvement: Don’t have friggin’ Dracula walking around throwing friggin’ sticks of dynamite around. I mean, seriously, WTF?

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  • Hasimir Fenring

    I’m one of the fans of Monster Squad, though I haven’t seen the film in many years. It may have helped that I was a mere 7 years old when it was made, which puts me just under the age they were probably aiming it at. Still, you’re right both that there’s room for improvement and that the remake is likely to be worse.

    I could certainly do without the scene of Dracula calling a first-grader ‘you bitch’. Makes me wince every time I think about it.

  • I too am a huge fan of Monster Squad even though I was in my 20s at the time. I can’t understand why Ken doesn’t love it, and I am fully on board with Dracula throwing dynamite – which he does to destroy the kid’s clubhouse which I thought was hilarious. And I don’t mind Dracula calling a kid a bad name. Jeeze, he’s evil, remember?

  • I don’t have a good feeling about this. The word ‘remake’ is practically synonomous with ‘disaster’ in Hollywood.

  • sandra

    I actually saw Monster Squad at a special matinee, where I was the only person over twelve in the audience. My heart sank when I realized this, but the kids were very well behaved. I don’t suppose any of them realized the significance of Scary German Guy’s concentration camp tattoo, though. In Hollywood, remake means you take a good movie and change everything that was good about it – why not just reissue the original for a new generation, the way Disney does?- or you take a crappy movie and make it even worse. Remakes are nothing new, though; The Maltese Falcon was a remake of Satan Met A Lady, though in that case they improved on the original.

  • Being that I consider the original Overboard to be a “guilty pleasure” or whatever, I am dismayed by this news. Also- Jennifer Lopez belongs in absolutely nothing. And no remake of Monster Squad will top the raggedy charm of the original. I know they’re “old” movies now, but remakes haven’t been decent since the mini-boom of 80’s horror reboots like The Fly, The Thing and even The Blob.

    And Ken, yer only 11 years older than me, for pete’s sake!

  • Rock Baker

    I’m just under 30, but I’d wager than needless remakes tick me off just as much, maybe even more, as they do you. I’ve only had the urge to ‘remake’ one film I’ve ever seen, and what I wanted to do was make a new version of Blood Waters of Dr. Z that was more like the poster art. You see, I had the one sheet for a few years before I saw the movie and it was nothing like the plot suggested by the tagline: “Your invitation to a moonlight swim, -Where fear ends and madness begins!” Hmmm, now that I think about it, that sounds like a tagline for an 80s slasher flick. Never mind.

  • jzimbert

    “My name… is HORACE.”

    Sorry, I just really always identified with the Fat Kid in Monster Squad. Too bad the actor’s not still around to do a cameo.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Ken, I’m probably older than you are, and I’m resigned to the fact that movies are no longer made for me, or with anything approaching my sensibilities in mine.

    There’s a very nice solace, though, in that more and more things that I actually like are making it to DVD.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Remakes used to have a sort of logic to them, but that kind of vanished when home video meant the originals were readily available. Now, I suppose the thinking is, “Hey it has name recognition AND Jennifer Lopez, how could it NOT have socko box office appeal and knock that crown right off Avatar’s head?”

    Didn’t they already remake the Monster Squad some years back? “Van Helsing”? Haven’t seen either so I don’t know.

    I found a DVD of The Terror of Tiny Town this weekend.

  • Mr. Rational

    Ken, you really wanna feel old? Did you know Corey Haim is dead? Pray for the rollerboy…

  • alex

    I saw Overboard on a double bill with Jaws 4 The revenge back in 87. And I survived.

  • Marsden

    I had a link somewhere where warners bros. is looking into doing the Wizard of Oz books now that Harry Potter is winding down. They wouldn’t be a remake of the famous movie of the same name but a “closer to the book” adaptation. I actually an interested an cringing horribly at the same time as I dislike that the famous musical made Oz into a dreamland/hallucination of Dorothy’s rather than in the book where Oz is a supposed “real” fairyland that a person could actually get to by certain means.

    Note the famous Wizard of Oz was not the first adaptation of the book, so it was a remake and you could say an improvement. I’m afraid anything that follows the book closer would be compared to that movie and if they actually follow the book (dubious at best) people will complain about “changing things” when they are actually “putting them back” so to speak. There are 14 Oz novels written by the original author and then a shitload more by others so WB is looking for another franchise here.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I read one of the Oz books as a kid–the actual Wizard one, I think–and there were a lot of differences.

    However, you’re right, it will be compared to the movie since I imagine more people have seen the movie than have read any of the books.

    (The books are all in the public domain now. I could get them for free for the Kindle.)

  • I’ve read all the Oz books, and I don’t really care if Warner does them or not. I’m sure they’d bungle it. But I’m not sure why they need to try to start up the Oz franchise, when there is a perfectly good Narnia franchise going begging.