Rish Outfield's reviews
I watched Martin Scorsese's remake of the 1962 thriller as a double feature with the original. It both helped and hindered this review.
DeNiro gets top billing as the enormously built, tattooed, Bible-quoting madman Max Cady. He was scary as hell as this unbelievably brutal, intimidating man. Nick Nolte plays Sam Bowden, but isn't as decent as was Gregory Peck. Jessica Lange plays the not-always-supportive wife. Juliette Lewis plays Danielle, Nolte's dirty little girl, who thinks her father's concern for her is funny. Frankly, she's really hard to like. In an interesting turn, the three male leads of original appear in the remake--Robert Mitchum shows up in the Martin Balsam role, Martin Balsam plays a judge, and Gregory Peck plays a smooth-talking lawyer. The film is filled with good performances, especially by DeNiro (of course), who is so menacing as Cady that I sat up and cheered the first time he got his.
The story is the same as the original film's, with a few deviations. Cady served fourteen years instead of eight, and Nolte was his defense attorney instead of the prosecutor. This time, the hero is not 100% innocent. In fact, it's a dishonourable thing he did that got Cady after him in the first place, as opposed to simple unmotivated revenge. The music, reused Bernard Herrmann score from the original, is jarring and somewhat intrusive out-of-place in this version. This was intense from the very beginning, recreating a lot of the same incidents as the original, but faster, intensified, and not dwelt on for long. Much more clearly and obviously a horror film than was the original (which I had to stretch slightly to fit the HFC peg-holes). DeNiro's Max Cady is unstoppable--omnipresent as well as omnipotent--as completely impervious to pain as any android or reanimated corpse.
Probably, though, the most interesting new aspect of the film is Danielle (the daughter)'s relationship/fascination with Max Cady. Even though we know Cady is evil, there's something poetic, something strangely attractive about his talk, his mannerisms. He draws in the girl, who is at the point in her life that comes for everyone, angry at what she perceives to be hypocrisies and shortcomings of her parents and attracted to temptation, to vice, to all that isn't like her folks. In the original, the daughter was becoming a woman physically, but was still a child inside, making Peck (and us) instantly protective of her. In this version, we are torn since she's a rebellious troublemaker, but still a girl who doesn't know the fire she's playing with burns as well as makes a pretty light. The scenes with Cady and Danielle are difficult to watch at times--the "do you mind if I put my arm around you" scene is horribly uncomfortable. Every father's nightmare, but also representative of how a parent feels about their child's sexuality. See, we know he is bad news, but when she talks to him, she takes what he says at face value, like a child would. She's afraid of him, but tries to overcome her childhood fear (which is the correct impulse in this case) and give in to her sexual and rebellious inclinations.
There was a very intense scene involving a teddy bear and Joe Don Baker. Even more intense was the Illeana Douglas ouch scene. The final over-the-top storm sequence was so stylized, violent, and exaggerated that I think it may have lost a little in the way of believability and audience impact. Still, I was watching this from a pretty critical eye, and normal folk would probably be riveted.
Though it's very well done, very intense (there's that word again), it's perhaps not as satisfying as the original, because it goes so above and beyond. It may be that there's just too much going on, that they took a simple, straightforward story, and threw everything they could into it, made it too complex, tried too hard. It's a fine film, but not a better one.
I'd Recommend It To: Scorsese/DeNiro/Suspense fans. You might want to watch them both back to back, like I did.

Total Skulls: 16

Sequel
Sequel setup
Rips off earlier film
Horror film showing on TV/in theater in movie
Future celebrity appears
Former celebrity appears
Bad title
Bad premise
Bad acting
Bad dialogue
Bad execution
MTV Editing
OTS
Girl unnecessarily gets naked
Wanton sex
Death associated with sex
Unfulfilled promise of nudity
Characters forget about threat
Secluded location
Power is cut
Phone lines are cut
Someone investigates a strange noise
Someone runs up stairs instead of going out front door
Camera is the killer
Victims cower in front of a window/door
Victim locks self in with killer
Victim running from killer inexplicably falls
Toilet stall scene
Shower/bath scene
Car stalls or won't start
Cat jumps out
Fake scare
Laughable scare
Stupid discovery of corpse
Dream sequence
Hallucination/Vision
No one believes only witness
Crazy, drunk, old man knows the truth
Warning goes unheeded
Music detracts from scene
Death in first five minutes
x years before/later
Flashback sequence
Dark and stormy night
Killer doesn't stay dead
Killer wears a mask
Killer is in closet
Killer is in car with victim
Villain is more sympathetic than heroes
Unscary villain/monster
Beheading
Blood fountain
Blood hits camera
Poor death effect
Excessive gore
No one dies at all
Virgin survives
Geek/Nerd survives
Little kid lamely survives
Dog/Pet miraculously survives
Unresolved subplots
"It was all a dream" ending
Unbelievably happy ending
Unbelievably crappy ending
What the hell?