Devin at CHUD has recently decried the American remaking of Let the Right One In, and I couldn't agree more. From reporting the director attached as Cloverfield's Matt Reeves to the major objection of the original film's director to the idea of the remake, Devin's been covering this thing better than anyone else, in true CHUD form.

He brings up an important distinction in one article or another about how he doesn't want to see a remake of Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes go through but at the least that remake has the original visionary's blessing. I'm very conditional with remakes, but as we all know well, most of them are worthless. Then again, proportionately, the vast majority of movies completed around the world are worthless when you think about it. I believe in remakes like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, culled from James Toback's Fingers. I will defend Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate to the end of my days.

Touching various elements of Let The Right One In ruins the delicate construction of the entire piece.

Title

Change the title to Let Me In (one of the approximated translations of the book's title) or My New Neighbor or The New Girl Next Door or Can I Borrow a Liter of Plasma or any other focus-grouped, marketing agency-reworked version of the title makes no sense. The title as it stands is poetic.

Age

When you augment the age of the leads, the movie becomes one of two things:

1) Twilighterrific
2) a dork meets goth girl stereotyporama where the casting agency posts a notice looking for "Rainn Wilson but 16"

Violence

Did we learn nothing from the tanking of Hostel 2 and other gorefests? Adding gore for effect is something the American public is over, big-time. The fact this movie