The John Carpenter Memorial Show

Despite the raging heat and blazing sun that has engulfed London I found time over the weekend to watch the remake of Assault on Precinct 13. Now I used to be a bit of a John Carpenter obsessive. Not a completist (though I have seen Ghosts of Mars, which must count for something), but a fan of the classics - The Thing, Escape from New York, Halloween and, yes, the original Assault. The 2005 version is perfectly adequate but I still found myself asking the same question that must have occurred to any fan of Japanese horror on entering a multiplex in the last few years - why remake these films?

Now I know there's a bit of pot and kettle going on here. The Thing is, technically, a remake of Howard Hawks' Thing From Another World. However, what Carpenter did was rework a classic story (indeed, return to the original source material - John Campbell's short storyWho Goes There?) in the cinema style of the time, the body horror video nasty. By contrast what has Jean-Francois Richet done for one of the minimalist classics of modern cinema? The faceless horrors of the street gang become a bunch of identikit corrupt cops, the influential electronica soundtrack disappears and the brilliantly tense climax, with the few survivors forced into the last corner of the station becomes a dreary gun-fight in a snowy forest.

It's not that this is a terrible film, more a pointless one. The only points of interest come with those few shred of the original not to be hacked out - for instance when two survivors look to have escaped only for one of the bad guys to pop his head out from the back seat of their car. Otherwise it's easily lost in the pile of comparablew police thrillers - The Negotiator springs instantly to mind as, for some reason, does Narc. If you're going to remake a film, do something new with it.