Fear.dot.com/ Film Pilager The Devil as Little blond girl and her white ball

I suffer from remake-itus as it is. Very rarely do I have interest unless I feel that either the director or the use of technology might make the film a unique offering or an interesting addition and not a substitute?*

Special note about FeardotCom– I not only hated this film but I was angered by the blatant rip-off of Bava’s imagery of the little blond girl used as the symbolic Devil figure in Kill Baby Kill and the Toby Dammit sequence from Spirits of The Dead directed by Federico Fellini and artfully acted by the great Terence Stamp.

The use of the little eerie blond girl bouncing a white ball was a well-known motif used by these directors and I wish that William Malone would have at least admitted his usage as homage. I could find no such tip of the hat to these iconic images in any of his interviews about the film, and so I dismiss this film with a certain antagonism toward pillaged workmanship. At least DePalma talks openly about his reverence for Hitchcock when he’s used similar mechanisms in his films. I wonder if Malone thought that this new contemporary filmgoer might not have knowledge of the great Bava. He insults my intelligence, as well as the curiosity of young people everywhere. insert (deep huff). Ti West Lucky Mckee, Fessenden,  del Toro, and JT Petty manage very well to come up with inspiring imagery and unique characters in their screenplays.

And notice, as I’ve mentioned in prior posts, her mouth is slashed from ear to ear, what an original concept. This film utilizes nothing unique, I’m surprised it didn’t incorporate a “women skinning psychopath” who’s out to make himself a lady suit, a mummified mother in the basement, the seven deadly sins, and kryptonite.

Let’s throw in taking the slashed mouth from Conrad Veidt’s portrait of Hugo’s character Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs(1928)-MG