10 Horror Remakes That Are Actually Worth Your Time & Money

This past Halloween, my friends Jess, Kate, and Lor had a costume party (I went as Chief Brody from Jaws, in case you're wondering). At one point in the evening, Jess decided to throw a horror movie on in the background, settling on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However, when I noticed that she was talking about the 2003 remake, I badgered her into not putting it on, and in the fallout, no one could settle on an appropriate movie. This says two things. 1) I am not much of a party guest. And, 2) my reputation as a remake hater precedes me. Granted, I do generally roll my eyes at the thought of an idea-starved Hollywood throwing more and more of my childhood favourites into the Platinum Dunes meat grinder. But, that being said, there are a number of horror remakes that I do enjoy, and some that I downright adore, even more than the originals that inspired them. I even find myself looking forward to 2013's remakes of Carrie and The Evil Dead--the former because of the talent involved, the latter because of the back-to-basics approach and wild gore seen in the film's red-band trailer. So, in the interest of proving that I'm not just a snobby old-school purist, here are ten horror remakes that I would happily recommend, in no particular order.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004): Zack Snyder's ultra-grim, fast-moving variant on George Romero's 1978 masterpiece ditches the original's biting consumerist satire, and is most definitely the poorer for it. But this update switches out social commentary for new spins on the zombie apocalypse setting, like the friendly game of "Spot-The-Celebrity-Zombie-Lookalike" and the much-maligned, but frankly scarier, running ghouls. Snyder's spin on the material lacks the dramatic weight of the original, but it's still a gory, hair-raising crowd pleaser.

FRIGHT NIGHT (2011): I still prefer the 1985 original with William Ragsdale, Roddy McDowall, and Chris Sarandon, but that doesn't mean I didn't get a kick out of Anton Yelchin, David Tennant, and Colin Ferrell in this Las Vegas-set revamp (ouch!). The sharp script by Buffy vet Marti Noxon wisely maintains the original's tongue-in-cheek tone, and the 3D in the theatrical release was surprisingly effective. The '11 version loses points for its reliance on CGI over practical effects, but gains them for Ferrell's sly turn as a himbo bloodsucker named, of all things, Jerry.

THE THING (1982): What modern-day horror fan doesn't love John Carpenter's gooey, apocalyptic update of the Cold War classic? Besides featuring Rob Bottin's most accomplished effects work, the '82 model also features a bearded Kurt Russell at his most badass, and has one of the cinema's great bleak endings. You could argue that this is merely a new, more faithful adaptation of the short story "Who Goes There?" By John Campbell, which inspired the 1951 version as well, but as long as we all agree to skip the unfortunate 2011 version, we'll all get along just fine.

DRACULA (1979): As I said about The Thing above, John Badham's romanticized take on the classic chiller is also a new adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel more than it's a remake (well, technically, it's an adaptation of the stage play version, as was the 1931 Lugosi film). It's also the first version of the Dracula story I ever saw on screen, when CTV debuted it during prime time in the early Eighties, and it remains my favourite take on the material. Frank Langella, magnetic in the role of the legendary Count, headlines an impressive cast that features Laurence Olivier, Donald Pleasance, and Kate Nelligan, and John Williams' elegant score is one of his unsung masterpieces.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978): The 1956 original Don Siegel film is still a white-knuckle classic of Cold War paranoia, but Phillip Kaufman's reimagining of the Jack Finney novel remains one of the scariest tales of alien terror ever made. Kaufman's film stars Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, a very young Jeff Goldblum, and perpetual extraterrestrial hysteric Veronica Cartwright. Substituting Communist hysteria with New Age psychobabble, the '78 version unfolds with an air of inescapable dread, ending with one of the most downbeat final images of the genre. And no, I'm not just talking about Sutherland's perm-and-moustache combo, either.

LET ME IN (2010): The only movie more doomed to fan derision than a remake of a beloved horror movie is a remake of a beloved foreign-language horror movie. The Swedish original, 2008's Let The Right One In, is a deeply affecting tale of doomed adolescent love, but I think I prefer Matt Reeves' Americanized redo just a bit more. Chloe Grace-Moretz is commanding as the forever-young vampire, and the always-great Richard Jenkins is heartbreaking as her past-his-prime human protector. The New Mexico setting adds an interesting layer of guilty history to the story (this is, after all, where the atomic bomb was built), and the crash filmed from the inside of the car is a show-stopping sequence.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006): I've never been much of a fan of Wes Craven's 1977 original, which sees an extended family battling their cracked-mirror reflections in the form of a hillbilly clan mutated by atomic testing in the desert. But Alexandre Aja's supersick update is leaner, meaner, and much scarier. By the time this movie hit theatres, deformed white-trash villains were becoming more than a little cliche, but Aja uses the remote setting to make them terrifying all over again. And the final showdown, set in a 1950s-style, mannequin-inhabited mock neighbourhood built to be nuked, is inspired.

THE BLOB (1988): The scariest thing about the 1958 original might be the theme song by Burt Bacharach, so writer Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell had their work cut out for them. The '88 Blob goes the '82 Thing route, filling its running time with scene after scene of highly imaginative gore. The new-model alien glop doesn't just consume its victims, it corrodes them, and will stop at nothing to continue feeding--pulling victims through drains, manholes, walls, even crushing them inside phone booths. There's also a cool new government-paranoia-inspired twist on the Blob's origins, and a nifty final scene that sets up a sequel which, sadly, never happened.

PIRANHA (2010): Calling Alexandre Aja's (him again!) gleefully gory 3D offering a remake of Joe Dante's 1978 drive-in favourite might be a bit charitable. Other than the toothsome antagonists, the two films have very little in common. Whereas Dante's Roger Corman-produced original unleashed the title carnivores (the product of genetic weapons research conducted for river warfare in Vietnam) on a summer camp full of unsuspecting children, Aja's film lets the evil little fishies (here, prehistoric creatures released from an underwater fissure) loose on a phalanx of bikini-clad Spring Breakers. As a result, the refreshingly R-rated movie has boobs and blood in equal measure, plus an Eighties-friendly cast that includes Elizabeth Shue, Christopher Lloyd, and Richard Dreyfuss in a cameo nod to his iconic Jaws role.

THE FLY (1986): I actually haven't watched David Cronenberg's remake of the 1958 sci-fi classic in years, and I'm a little afraid to--I've seen a lot of disgusting movies in my day, but none are as quite as stomach-churning as this one is. Part tragic romance between winning leads Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, part STD-allegory (Cronenberg's film landed during the early years of the AIDS crisis), all flesh-crawling body horror, The Fly set a new standard for animatronics, gore effects and the science of accidentally turning lab monkeys inside out. The 1989 sequel starring Eric Stoltz and Daphne Zuniga may have even been more gory, but it lacks the heartbreaking human drama at the centre of Cronenberg's original.

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012 (Part 6)

THE BEAST WITHIN (1982): The first ten minutes of The Beast Within are so poorly lit, I could barely make out what was happening. Given the gruesome content, though, it's kind of a mercy. A young woman in Mississippi in 1964 is attacked and raped by some sort of werewolfy, demony, monstery something-or-other. Cut to 17 years later, where we learn that the woman (Bibi Besch, AKA Kirk's old flame from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan) now has a teenage son named Michael (Paul Clemens) who suffers from a mysterious illness possibly related to his true parentage. Michael's mom and dad (Ronny Cox) are determined to cure their son, not knowing that the teen is sneaking away to a decrepit old farmhouse to confer with a mysterious voice from the cellar, or that he's prone to committing savage murders on the sly. As Michael continues to slowly transform into a sweaty monster, the truth about his origins begins to emerge, which involve a family feud, a guy chained up & slowly turned into a cannibalistic creature, and a bunch of townspeople conspiring to cover it all up. It's a pretty nonsensical explanation, especially considering Michael's all-out, skin-busting transformation into a full-fledged beast-man at the end, but then, The Beast Within is not a particularly good movie. The plot is foolish, and the opening rape scene has an equally unpleasant coda at the end of the film (presumably designed to set up a sequel which, unsurprisingly, never materialized). Some of the monster effects are okay, the supporting cast features some cool folks like R.G. Armstrong and Peckinpah favourite L.Q. Jones, and it's kind of cool to see a horror movie set in the South that's not just populated with evil rednecks (well, maybe one or two). But otherwise, if you need a good monster-transformation fix, you'd do better to revisit The Howling or An American Werewolf In London instead.

ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948): I first saw Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein on TV as a little kid, and it wouldn't be until years later that I would realize that I had gotten my love of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink ensemble stories like The Monster Squad and the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic books directly from this movie. In addition to the title monster, played here by Glenn Strange, Bud & Lou also run afoul of Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula, and Lon Chaney Jr. as both Lawrence Talbot and his furry alter ego, the Wolf Man. Abbott & Costello play a pair of bumbling baggage handlers named Chick & Wilbur who are tasked with delivering the original bodies of Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster to a House of Horrors, not realizing that the terror titans are still alive in their crates. Dracula is looking for a new, less intelligent brain for the Monster so he can control him better, and a curvy evil scientist (Lenore Aubert) plans to achieve this by seducing the dimwitted Wilbur and stealing his gray matter. The lycanthropically-cursed Lawrence Talbot arrives from Europe to try and foil Drac's plan, all the while struggling to keep his own murderous impulses in check. There's plenty of verbal slapstick, wacky chase scenes, and further eye candy in the form of a wily insurance investigator (Jane Randolph). The final scene even includes an appearance by the Invisible Man, in a voice cameo by Vincent Price. A lot of the jokes haven't really aged well--Lou Costello's mincing man-child act is pretty strange by today's standards--but others still hold up fine. When a confused Chick, who can't see why Aubert's Sandra has chosen Wilbur over himself, sighs "I just don't get it", she replies, "And you never will". There's also the classic exchange where Talbot bemoans the fact that when the moon is full he'll turn into a wolf, which is met by Wilbur's quick retort, "Yeah, you and 20 million other guys". Good-natured, G-rated silliness, culminating in giddy monster mayhem in the final reel.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011): We Need To Talk About Kevin is really more of a psychological thriller than a straight horror movie, but the familial territory it explores is pretty scary stuff. The story, adapted from Lionel Shriver's novel, unspools in dreamlike fragments that drift back in forth in time from the present day, where a pale, fragile woman named Eva (the always-fascinating Tilda Swinton) is a neighbourhood pariah, to the past where she was mother to a wickedly hostile son possessed of a cruel, calculating intelligence (Kevin is played by three different actors at different ages, culminating in an seriously creepy performance by Ezra Miller). As Kevin grows, and mother & son grow further apart, Eva begins to suspect that her child may be some sort of sociopath...or possibly something much, much worse. Eva's husband, played with exasperated good humour by John C. Reilly, maintains a healthy relationship with the boy and is either unable or unwilling to see the warning signs until it's too late. The film explores what it must be like for the parents when a disaffected teen commits a heinous act like Kevin's inevitable rampage, and Swinton is perfect at portraying a mother who is at a loss to explain how her son could have done such a thing, while also conveying a brittle, selfish, judgmental woman who never wanted a child to begin with, and was subsequently incapable of steering him anywhere but down a destructively antisocial path. Director Lynne Ramsay opts for a deeply queasy feeling of sustained dread rather than utilizing gore effects, shocking musical stings, or left-field plot twists, and the result is far more unsettling and engaging than your standard suburban psycho fare. We Need To Talk About Kevin may not be scary in the traditional sense, but it'll keep you up at night just the same.