Top Plug of the Week

THE FLOP HOUSE IS COMING TO CHICAGO! Despite 2/3 of the Peaches being from the Midwest, we’ve rarely been able to get back (this is only our 2nd time in Chicago/first solo show there!) so we’re very happy to finally make good on a longstanding promise to return! On Sunday, November 16, at 7pm, we’ll be bringing our usual shenanigans to Sleeping Village! It’s an intimate venue, so get those tickets early!

We’ll be discussing 1990’s TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS, starring one of the most Chicago of flopstars, James “Jim” Belushi, as well as doing three comedy presentations that can only be seen live, and hobnobbing with the audience! We’d love to see you there!

Remakes that DON’T Suck

Since our next episode covers one of the worst, least-necessary remakes of recent years (see “Next on the Podcast” below!) I thought it would be nice to throw some love to some GOOD remakes — ones that not only manage to justify their existence, but actually bring something new to the artistic table.

Let’s start with the cream of the crop — in alphabetical order, five movies that surpass the originals:

• The Fly - The 1958 original has a great concept, fun period effects, and Vincent Price making sure everything goes down like delicious ham, but the 1986 David Cronenberg remake takes what could seem like a silly concept and turns it into a goopy body horror picture that’s also a heartbreaking metaphor for watching a loved one suffer with incurable disease.

• His Girl Friday - A remake of 1931’s The Front Page (based on the play of the same name), His Girl Friday does its source material one better by gender-swapping the Hildy Johnson role and making her the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s Walter Burns. What was originally just a story about an unscrupulous editor scheming to keep his star reporter becomes a stealth romance about a man desperate to win back his wife. He might get a bit too cruel in his manipulations for modern audiences, but I think the movie just gets away with it, by showing Hildy to be equally formidable, and by making it clear that she’d never be happy playing housewife to Ralph Bellamy anyway.

• The Man Who Knew Too Much - Perhaps a cheat, since the 1956 version is a director remaking his own work from 1934, but Alfred Hitchcock compared them both by saying: "Let's say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." The ‘34 version is by no means bad — it’s got beautiful snowy black and white cinematography and Peter Lorre to recommend it, but it’s hard to beat the latter’s Jimmy Stewart and that final Royal Albert Hall suspense sequence.

• Ocean’s Eleven - Probably the least-arguable inclusion on the list — 1960’s more numerically-inclined Ocean’s 11 is widely accepted to be a dull excuse for the rat pack to goof around in Vegas and get paid for their lazy shenanigans. Stephen Soderbergh took the barest framework of “11 guys do a Vegas heist” and turned it into his most purely entertaining film, filled with style, star power, and a genuinely smart script that makes the fun not feel like empty calories.

• The Thing - Followed by perhaps the most arguable. 1951’s The Thing from Another World’s credited director Christian Nyby, but it’s always been rumored to have been directed by its producer, His Girl Friday’s Howard Hawks. As such, initial reviews of John Carpenter’s 1982 version (shortened to The Thing) treated the remake as heresy — how DARE Carpenter tarnish an old Hollywood legend like Hawks by remaking his film with gross-out creature effects? And the original IS pretty great, especially if you have any affection for atomic age sci-fi, but the remake hews closer to the short story that inspired both films, “Who Goes There?” with its shape-shifting hidden monster (replacing the giant alien carrot of the ‘51 film). Carpenter’s version is not only a great remake, but just might be my favorite horror movie of all time.

Some runners up — not “better” than the originals, but cases where it’s worth seeing both, or picking depending on your tastes and mood:

1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers shifts the cold war paranoia of the 1956 version to a new cultural moment. 1960’s The Magnificent Seven takes all of the “fun” parts of 1956’s Seven Samurai for a streamlined pop Western version of the Kurosawa original. The 2018 Suspiria replaces the gaudy neon thrills of the 1977 movie with a slow burn that leads to an explosion. The Coen Brothers’ 2010 True Grit might not have the iconic baggage of late-period John Wayne in the 1969 version, but it hews closer to Charles Portis’s wry novel. 1977’s Sorcerer lacks the classic, quiet intensity of 1953’s The Wages of Fear, but it’s an intense Tangerine Dream-fueled nightmare all its own.

And lastly, it’s not really fair to consider 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors to be a remake of the 1960 Corman film, since it’s really an adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical inspired by the original, but it’s too good a movie to not be mentioned somewhere in here!

Next on the Podcast

8/16 - Vulture writer Rebecca Alter joins us to discuss Snow White (2025), perhaps the least-essential of that least-essential genre, “Disney live action remake.”

8/23 - Stuart guides us on a trip down memory lane, to recall the biggest hits of past summer movie seasons.

Plugging Away

Stuart will be appearing LIVE this Sunday, August 17 at 7:30 pm on Hello from the Magic Tavern at City Winery in Philly! Get your tickets to see him join in the excellent fantasy shenanigans! He also paints Warhammer models/chats with viewers most Fridays on his Twitch channel. Also, Sharlene’s gym Jiggle Studio is now open for business!

Dan’s been making the podcast rounds. He was on the just-released Maximum Film episode about the reboot of The Naked Gun. He also appeared on a couple of upcoming episodes — Overhated to discuss 1981’s Neighbors, and Talking Simpsons to discuss Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Badassss Song.

Elliott stopped by the podcast Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk About Comics recently, to discuss the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. On the book side, his first Harley Quinn trade paperback just released, and you can also pick up his delightful kids’ book Sadie Mouse Wrecks the House!

You Made it to the End!

Here’s Dan and Stu with our guest Rebecca, having survived talking about Snow White!