BLACK HOLE remake coming

While it's generally dismissed as an expensive dud, The Black Hole is a movie I have enormous affection and respect for. They set out to make a story about a mad Captain Nemo in space, and they went all out. Chatty floating robots with googly eyes aside, it's an incredibly dark movie, with a sinister, cathedral-like starship, an army of killer androids headed up by the flying red terror known as Maximilian, a lobotomized zombie-cyborg crew who have just enough humanity left to still hold funerals for their fallen comrades, and Maximilian Schell as the crazed scientist behind it all. Some of the dialogue clunks and the science gets quite dodgy at times, but this is a beautifully made movie, with great art direction, thrilling action sequences and a startling and disturbing ending that takes us through hell itself and then drops out on the other side, wherever the heck that might be.

I greet the news of the upcoming remake with dread, tinged with the inevitable fanboy eagerness to see all of the "re-imagined" characters and gizmos. But harken ye unto my words, Hollywood: screw this one up, and don't be surprised if, when you expire decades hence, you find yourselves encased in a red android shell, perched on a high rocky outcrop looking down on a Stygian scene right out of Dante's Inferno. This could be your future, boys:



(Actually, it is my sincere hope that when the execs who greenlight crappy and insulting movie remakes finally die, they all go to special hells themed after the properties they desecrated in life. So, the guy who signed off on the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat spends eternity being flayed by Thing One and Thing Two, while the cokehead who approved the Land of the Lost movie spends a few millennia getting chased through twisty underground caverns by randy Sleestaks.)

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