With the new Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers' The Eye arriving in theaters this coming Friday — and with the new Hollywood remake of Takashi Miike's One Missed Call hustling out to make room for it — Terrence Rafferty ponders this thing called the glut of American remakes of recent Asian horror pictures. (Not everything gets a pithy term around here.) The success of Gore Verbinski's The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu, and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, the director's English-language remake of his own Ju-On, guaranteed that there will many more films of this kind, even though, whether taken individually or as a singular continental phenomenon, adapting Asian horror movies for the Hollywood assembly line is a precarious business. Not that there aren't worse ways to go about it: as Rafferty notes, back in "the Stone Age of exploitation-movie history, shrewd Hollywood producers would simply have done what they did with the Japanese monster movies of that era: chop them up, hastily dub them into English and — if the repackagers were feeling particularly frisky — shoot a few minutes of new footage with a minor, familiar and presumably desperate American actor. Say what you will about remakes, they seem, all in all, a better option than Raymond Burr in Godzilla."
What neither remaking or recutting can easily finesse is the special mood — a haunting, eerie gloominess that seems to link a familiarity with ghosts to a lack of faith in any long-term future on this earth — that permeates so many of the original films. When Takashi Shimizu agreed to go through the chore of making Ju-On again — a task that he must have found to be a congenial one, since he's also made sequels to both the Japanese and American versions and is about to bring forth The Grudge 3 — he was canny enough to have Sarah Michelle Gellar, Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall and William Mapother come to Japan, rather than risk trying to make the story's underpinnings take root in, say, Boston. (Rafferty singles out Dark Water starring Jennifer Connelly and directed by Walter Salles, as a rare example of an uprooted Asian ghost story that works rather well in its new setting — a damp, crumbling fortress of an apartment complex on Roosevelt Island.) Then there are the special idiosyncrasies of some of the filmmakers who have been drawn to this material. There has to be an easier way to make a living than trying to render a Takashi Miike screenplay clear and understandable to a mass audience — didn't it ever occur to Eric Valete, the director of the American version of One Missed Call, that he might be happier walking through open fields in Eastern Europe, to see if there were still active land mines in the area? Nor is there any need to translate the remarkable work of the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is less a formulaic genre filmmaker than a nightmare poet (and a disciple of Val Lewton) working out his own fantasies of isolation and apocalyptic loneliness, into incoherent junk like the recent Pulse, with Kristen Bell.
As for The Eye, Rafferty detects "a half-detectable increase in optimism" in the new version, which means that the haunted quality that makes the original so hard to shake off may have been lost in translation: "That stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling might be induced by, say, the production values of the American version of The Eye, which, in their relative luxuriousness, suggest a happier, more hopeful view of the world than the starker sets of the Pang brothers do; or by the casting of sunny-looking Jessica Alba as the heroine, played in the original by the beautiful but grim-faced Lee Sin-je. The role is essentially the same: A young blind woman has her vision restored by cornea transplants and begins to see, along with the ordinary sights of everyday life, disturbing, unaccountable visions of shadowy afterlives. Ms. Alba looks unpleasantly surprised; Ms. Lee looks shaken to her core (though somehow less surprised)."
