Oh, Mr Oz, voice of Yoda, why so little shame have you? Granted, Hollywood has eviscerated enough genuine classics in its relentlessly priapic remake mania that defiling a merely efficient chiller from the seventies may seem a trivial crime by now, but it's the utterly systematic nature of the gutting performed here that really impresses and sets the film apart. All air of menace is lost in the translation of the basic plot into what the director imagines is actually functional as black comedy, but that's small potatoes compared to the braindeadness of the thought process behind the politics of the film. Whereas Katharine Ross in the original was a gutsy free spirit threatened by still extant residues of a suffocating 1950s conservatism, and the men pathetically threatened country clubbers of a real dying era, here Nicole Kidman starts out as a soulless TV exec and we're somehow meant to feel for her just as a strong woman, regardless of her own vapidity. And conversely, compounding the mess, the forces of sinister conformity opposing her have remained totally unchanged from their '50s pastel homemaker models and so make no sense at all in a modern context.
Finally, as a coup de grace, Oz even cuts off the balls of the gratifyingly chilling ending of the 1975 film with a twist just for the sake of a twist, as Burton did with
Planet of the Apes, so as to feebly try to dupe the viewer into thinking there was some added value in their remake after all.
God knows Kidman, Midler and Walken have all been guilty on numerous occasions of crimes against principle and intellect with their role choices. When even they're unhappy with what they've been party to, we really are up the creek.
2/10
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