Top Ten Tuesday: Alien Visitations

This weekend finally sees the Canadian theatrical release of Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s much-discussed sci-fi film starring babe-of-the-moment Scarlett Johansson as an alien seducing and killing men in Scotland. While the premise makes it sound like just another Species sequel – albeit with an A-list actress as the lead – Glazer’s music-video background and the film’s seeming impenetrability (or at least thematic complexity) gives the film an arthouse reputation that was sorely missing from the Natasha Henstridge-headlined franchise – or most other alien movies, for that matter. Indeed, works detailing extra-terrestrials invading, investigating, or otherwise visiting our precious planet usually fall into one of two categories – big-budget blockbuster or B-movie obscurity – making Glazer’s more enigmatic approach all the stranger. With that in mind, and for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, I count down my favourite cinematic alien visitations.

Top Ten Tuesday: Necessary Remakes

You read all the time about unnecessary remakes in Hollywood: do-overs of films that were already pretty great. For whatever reason – the lack of original ideas, the average American viewer’s hatred of subtitles, or simple greed – studios have been content to churn out redo after reboot after re-imagining for years now, without any concern for the quality or cult status of the original films. Len Wiseman’s Total Recall. Rob Zombie’s Halloween. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (this one’s a different story, but I won’t get into it now). But what about those remakes that aren’t so unneeded? Whether it’s an American take on a foreign hit, a modern update of a dated classic, or merely a revision of a movie that wasn’t that good to begin with, there are quite a few of these apparent bad ideas that turn out to be not-so-bad in hindsight – enough for me to compile a top ten, anyway. Without further ado, here’s the inaugural edition of Top Ten Tuesdays: Necessary Remakes.