Remakes typically excite me about as much as sitting next to a guy on the train who sings along out loud with Counting Crows songs pumping through his ear buds, but every now and then, one comes out that isn’t too bad. This is okay. Not great, but not horrible, either. It’s entertaining kiddie horror fluff that does well with the scares and sneaks in touches of deadpan humor under the clever direction of Tobe Hooper. It’s also a good example of a remake done right. Here’s why:
1) They didn’t remake a great movie or a movie that’s associated strongly with a particular cast or director’s vision. No, they remade a piece of pulp, 1953’s Invaders from Mars, one of the most simple alien invasion flicks of its time, starring Who Cares and Nobody Remembers in the lead roles. The original is good, but it’s not a monument. Remaking movies is rarely an artist’s job; it’s a pulp hack’s job mostly. Good directors who indulge in a remake tend to embrace their inner pulp hack. They steal, exploit and shock in the name of slinging out entertainment. They start from a modest place. They don’t try to top masterpieces or replace casts who truly owned their roles. (I’d hold up Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear as another perfectly watchable example of this.)
2) They didn’t stray far from the original. I’m of the school of thought that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a remake that’s the same movie as its predecessor, except with modern special effects and a contemporary flavor. At the very least, it’s better than expanding a world that never needed it. This movie adds a scenery-chewing villain (Louise Fletcher as a battle-axe schoolteacher) that the original lacked, but is otherwise not much different from 1953 when it comes to the story. It replaces the 1950s Red Scare paranoia with some great Stan Winston alien designs executed with pre-CGI rubber and slime. A fair trade, I say.
3) It genuinely respects the original. It doesn’t confuse updating it with improving it. At the same time, it’s also not humbled by it. Both films coexist neatly. Hooper’s homages to ’53 are smart and subtle, such as the way he answers the original’s day-glo emerald greens of the UFO interiors (William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars is one of the very few sci-fi films of its time to be made in Technicolor) with outrageous color schemes of his own.
This bombed in theaters back in the summer of ’86. When the movie hit cable a year later, all of us kids saw it at least a couple of times. After thirty years, it remains breezy enough for one more little low-expectation nostalgic look. The supporting cast of cult movie luminaries such as James Karen, Karen Black and Bud Cort help a lot.