Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbusters video game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?

Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.

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• Blake Edwards will exec produce a redo of his 1979 comedy 10 along with son Geoffrey, who was an assistant editor on the original. I’d ask what young starlet you’d most like to see in cornrows, but of course a newcomer is being sought to fill the iconic Bo Derek role.
• A new version of Papillon, or at least a new adaptation of Henri Charriere’s autobiography, will be produced by two-time Oscar winner Branko Lustig (Schindler’s List; Gladiator). Could a remake receive more love from the Academy than did the original? It’s been done before…
• Like, totally bitchin: MGM is developing a musical remake of Valley Girl. Isn’t the ’80s music nostalgia thing over yet?
• The “remake” of Tim Burton’s Batman (don’t you remember this video?) is now in theaters, and blah blah blah record-breaking theater count blah blah blah possible record-breaking non-holiday weekend gross blah blah blah, as Karina would put it.

• Paramount doesn’t seem to be completely shutting down indie arm Paramount Vantage––they don’t seem to have given up on producing smaller-ticket prestige films, unlike Warner Brothers––but they are “folding the marketing, distribution and physical production departments of Paramount Vantage into the larger studio,” and eliminating three jobs in the process.
• Legendary 70s exploitation film I Spit On Your Grave is getting a remake. The producer of the remake cites the continuing meaninglessness of the rating system as the remake’s commercial imperative: “After seeing what was done with an R rating on films like ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel,’ we think we can modernize this story, be competitive with what this marketplace expects and not have to aim for an NC-17 or X rating.”
• Independently produced films are expected to “dominate activity in the late summer and early fall,” as SAG continues to issue waivers to producers not affiliated with studios as strike talks drag on. Also: Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant has a July 8 start date!
• Brian DePalma will make a film about The Boston Strangler. Yawn.

Bloody-Disgusting calls Plan 9 From Outer Space “arguable one of [Ed Wood's] only ‘good’ films” [sic], but the general consensus is that it’s one of the worst films of all time. But, um, maybe the remake will be better! Motivated by no logical reason other than the fact that they could have it ready in time of a 09/09/09 release date (well, okay––it is the original’s 50th anniversary, and since the film has lapsed into the public domain a remake can be done for cheap, cheap, cheap), Darkwave Entertainment is planning “a serious-minded retelling of the original story, paying homage to the spirit of Wood’s film without resorting to camp or parody.”

As BD points out, you can watch the original Plan 9 on Google Video, but we think the only way to possibly make sense of this is to watch the above scene from Tim Burton’s masterpiece, Ed Wood. Let’s shoot this fucker!

RKO has announced that they’re setting up a production company to remake eight classic, Val Lewton-produced thriller/horror films over the course of the next two years. The movies to be remade include I Walked With a Zombie (a mystical-racist spin on Jane Eyre, one of Lewton’s many collaborations with director Jacques Tourneur), While the City Sleeps (star-studded late Fritz Lang), Lady Scarface (the one starring Judith Anderson and Eric Blore, not the porno of the same title), The Body Snatcher (most notable for a single scene showdown between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Bedlam, The Leopard Man, The Monkey’s Paw, and The Seventh Victim.

I’m a huge fan of the Lewton films, but they’re not the kind of thing you can really be precious about––remaking Lewton’s library isn’t exactly like remaking Citizen Kane (which RKO coincidentally also holds the remake rights for). For the most part, Lewton was tasked with making micro-budget schlock that could be cranked out quickly and turn an even quicker profit, and it’s almost an accident that the films hold up as well as they do today.

But it is a bit troubling that Twisted Pictures––the people who brought us the Saw franchise––are co-financing four of the remakes, including I Walked With a Zombie. Even leaving aside the fact that Zombie is the one Lewton film I’ve seen that could never be made in its original form today––check out the “weird Black magic” double entendre in the original trailer above––the thing that makes the Lewton films great is that most of the scares are psychological, rooted in the implication of things that we can’t actually know and don’t actually see. Can you a imagine a more unnatural bedfellow than the see-everything style of Saw? No one’s expecting a batch of B-horror to be reformulated into grade-A masterpieces, but I don’t want to see RKO bastardize these titles as mere cover for the churning of more generic torture porn, either.

[Via Bloody-Disgusting]

• Oh, the perils of being an organization built on starfucking: if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can’t get the WGA to issue a waiver to allow writers to pen lame banter for the Golden Globes, then there’s a strong chance that most stars will refuse to cross the (real or theoretical) picket line to attend the ceremony. No stars=no photo ops=virtually no point in going through with the awards. Variety says the HFPA’s chances at landing a waver look slim, although the WGA just issued a similar pass to the SAG awards.
• In other awards news: Juno and Into the Wild lead the nominations for the Critics Choice Awards; Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, one of my favorite films of this year, and Bruce Greenwood McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year. Winnipeg will also open the Forum sidebar at the Berlin Film Festival in February. It’s screen alongside Green Porno, a collection of three short films by Isabella Rosselini about the sex lives of insects.
• This story is days old, but I missed it: a German producer has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Horror site Bloody-Disgusting is hosting a new clip from Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his 1997 film of the same name. This go-round stars Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet; in this clip, a ridiculously creepy Pitt goads Watts on an unpleasant scavenger hunt. Watch it here.

• David Benioff will adapt Charles Cross’ Kurt Cobain bio Heavier Than Heaven for a pic for Universal. Courtney Love and her lawyer, Howard Weitzman, will executive produce. Nikki Finke quickly railed against Love’s involvement, saying that Universal cannot “expect truthfulness” from a biopic with the backing of Cobain’s controversial widow. “This movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney,” Finke predicts, implying that only a Courtney-bashing Cobain biopic could give the fans the “truthfulness” they apparently require.
• Michael Bay’s production company has been working on a remake of The Birds for at least two and a half years; Naomi Watts has been attached for at least a year. So I guess the kernel of news in this story is the fact that Martin Campbell will direct, and Universal has no plans to rush the film into production before the various labor strikes commence.
• Roger Ebert will be present to accept a tribute at the Gotham Awards in Brooklyn next month. It will mark his second public appearance since falling ill in mid-2006, after his own Overlooked Film Festival earlier this year (although I did see him in screening-hopping in Toronto).

There’s a Korean movie called Juno Jenny that has something to do with two teens and the night of awkward passion that leads to an unplanned pregnancy. This is news to Diablo Cody, who wrote the script for Fox Searchlight’s much-splooged-over Juno, which is about two teens and the night of awkward passion that leads to an unplanned pregnancy. She blogged the other day about her movie’s “spiritual cousins” which, as she puts it, “is a much nicer way to point out a cool/weird coincidence than going ‘OMG PLAGIARISM!’”:

There’s no adoption subplot and apparently the film is otherwise dissimilar to mine, but how fucked up is that? I bring this up because a journalist drilled me about it recently–awkward!–and also because I saw someone on our IMDB board wondering if Juno was a remake of the K-flick. So for the record, 1.) it isn’t a remake 2.) I haven’t seen Juno Jenny, though I want to now, and 3.) I don’t think anyone would even bat an eye about this if my film was called Jenny. The name Juno is just so darned distinctive that confusion is inevitable.

More on Juno’s various spiritual cousins at the link.