I thought, seeing as it is Halloween, I would ask this question because I've been wondering this for a while. Has anyone ever created a poseable figure of any of the malevolent entities that pop up frequently in Asian horror cinema ? Just wondered, because these films are the flavor of the month right now, I've seen quite a few Japanese and (South) Korean movies with a similar theme, and I find these creatures (if that's what you call them) intriguing .....

Not alone intriguing, but damn scary! Watched the Ring II last night on DVD!

I watched a double-header last night : firstly "A Tale of Two Sisters" (Korean) followed by "One Missed Call" (Japanese). Both scary, and both with a similar creepy ghostly manifestation. BTW, the latter is yet another Japanese horror movie to be re-made by Hollywood.

I have to wonder why the heck they're doing all these remakes of perfectly good films, is it so the less intellectual out there can easily digest them or just plain laziness of the writers in hollywood?

Watching a movie in my native tongue is always a good thing, especially when dubbed translations aren't always perfect and as for subtitled... Well, I watch movies, not read them - that's what books are for. :)

I don't routinely watch scarey movies because my nerves just can't take it, LOL I did see "The Blair Witch Project", and practically laughed my way through it. Little kids were there with their parents going "Dad! This is sooooo stupid!" LOL I figured I got over my fear or scarey movies so I tried watching "The Ring" (English version). OMG!! I nearly died! It took me 3 days to get to the last day. I just couldn't sit and watch it for very long and had to keep turning it off. At the beginning of the last day I just couldn't watch it anymore. I was so freaked out. A girl at work finally told me the rest of the movie. To this day I have never finished the movie, and I gave the DVD to charity in my last charity give away. Will I watch the second one or the Japanese version (which is reportedly even freakier)? No freaking way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I remeber watching the Blair Witch project, and as soon as they threw away the map..I figured they had it coming..;)

I LOVE The Ring and the The Ring Two awesome movies! It would be interesting to see a character based on the girl!

Message edited on: 10/31/2005 12:23

[begin sarcasm] It seems perfectly logical to me. You've got this very scary movie, but it's in a "foreign" language, so why not remake it...fill it with Hollywood gloss and beautiful people, and then plonk Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the middle of it, because we all know people are too damn lazy to read the subtitles or are too dumb to read and watch at the same time. It certainly saves all those poor studio types having to wrack their brains to come up with an original idea once in a while. [end sarcasm]

I much prefer watching the originals, subtitled if possible. Trust me, there's a lot missing in the remake of Ju-On (The Grudge), much as The Ring has very different elements in the Hollywood version. Haven't seen the remake of Dark Water, but I'm betting on missing plot elements in the remake. Mathman: Tale of Two Sisters was great. Although I think the scariest part was just the horrible wallpaper in that house. It would have driven me insane. I'd love to find the fairy tale it's based on.

Anyone else think it's time for Hollywood to sack all the writers & get some new ones in who might actually have some ideas of their own?

"Anyone else think it's time for Hollywood to sack all the writers & get some new ones in who might actually have some ideas of their own?"

What, and deny us the banal, dreck they feed us now? Next thing I guess you'll be wanting originality on television as well. Thinking like yours is dangerous. Stay where you are, the black, unmarked helicopters are on the way to take you to a re-education facility :P

lol, if they re-educate me any more I'll be over qualified for thinking.

Anyone else think it's time for Hollywood to sack all the writers & get some new ones in who might actually have some ideas of their own?<<< Yes, and as we all know, it's writers who make ALL the decisions in Hollywood. They're totally in charge. Uh, huh. Sure. FYI, writers have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what gets made or how it ends up on the screen. And if all the writers were "sacked" tomorrow, then it would be...business as usual. STUDIO EXECUTIVES run everything. They TELL writers what to do. They beat them up and fire them (writers get "sacked" more frequently than Pam Anderson has boyfriends). Then they hire more writers and then tell THEM what to do until they get what they want, which is usually the mess you see on the screen. To be a writer in Hollywood is pure masochistic torture. If all the executives died tomorrow and writers were allowed to actually write, then the quality level in Hollywood films would automatically rise exponentially. All writers have "ideas of their own." Most of them never make it to the screen. -jjsemp

True enough. I've lost track of the times I've heard of some movie being worked on by a talented writer who later left the film because the producers demanded something ridiculous that the writer was unwilling to script because it f'ed up the story.

Scarab, I take it that's the front not the back.

Yep. Seems the guys who made The Ring used Poser to do the storyboards. Only problem is they were newbs, and a slip of the wrist y-rotated the hair 180 degrees. Before they could fix this mistake, they fell unconscious from too much sake, and when they awoke, the movie was already in theaters. Those Japanese are totally clueless when it comes to making movies. They even forgot to fix it in the sequel. p.s: :p

jjsemp raises a good point. Hollywood execs do employ good writers, they just ignore them when the present good - or most sinful of all - original ideas. Take a look at the history of Alien 3 (which I mention because it's troubles are pretty well documented now). The situation with Hollywood has been insulting for a long time now. There is a lot of great film talent in the States that just doesn't get seen because Hollywood execs seem to think that all audiences are stupid. Strangely, they think that most of Americans, making patronising changes such as: License to Till had been License Revoked - they didn't think that their audiences would know what revoked meant! The Madness of King George III lost the III because they thought that their audiences would wonder what happened to parts I and II! Insulting! You would think that they would look at how well the subtitled foreign language films sell. Even here in the sleepy town of Worthing (UK), DVD stores keep about 15-20% of their stock foreign language. A huge change from 15 years ago when the world cinema first began to creep toward the mainstream. What's more frustrating is that every now and then I come accross a excellent film from the States that just didn't get a proper disribution. They've been remaking foreign films for a long while now, and messing it up every time. The Vanishing, Les Diaboliques, Nightwatch, The Birdcage, Taxi, The Assasin, all come to mind. I read somewhere that last year cinema attendence was down something like 20%, with the big films no longer bringing the quite the same big bucks they were just a little while back. Sadly, I think the execs are too stupid to understand the message.