Let Battle Commence

News from the integrity frontline is not good. The bayonets have only just begun in their furious assaults, portions of flesh dancing in the air like a monk gone mad on the acidics. Hundreds of marching anonyms lined up in the vis-à-vis position, staring deep into ‘the other’ postured opposite. One side the heavy-hearted swarms of protest, people with the couplets of Chaucer spinning around in their skulls. The other side the gas-masked devils of dividend priority, the stooped and disfigured shapes of the studio execs. One side armed with DVD evidentials in remonstrate against the vicious attack on all semblances of decency being orchestrated by the suits. The other side with a large ledger filled with company memoranda authenticating the very intentions they aim to highlight.

One false word, one sneering countenance, one wind passed wrongly, is all that it will take to prompt those masses to advance straight into the atomising gulf laid out in front of them. It’s a dangerous time, who knows what will occur on the scarred earth where they are situated.

Hell, lets not beat that bush about, they are already warring. Conflicts erupting out of the ether at every temporal moment. There are even examples of malicious in-fighting, a once innocent remark such as “ah why not remake it,” is now justification for a venomous shoving of industrial revolution matter into orifices not more than one inch in circumference.

The battle lines were drawn when 20th Century Fox (yes Murdoch’s own pet mammal) announced it was to remake that most chilling of Satan-themed horrors, Richard Donner’s The Omen. The logic behind this move is weak even by studio standards, it isn’t the need for Americanisation of Asian cinema this time, it is none other than a date. This the year of 2006, a year that brings with it the opportunity to make marketing use of those numbers that feature so eloquently in the original The Omen, the three sixes. The release date stands at 6th June 2006. This is perhaps the first time a film’s release date has been set even before scripting and other pre-production activity have taken place.

And who are the actors in this cause of so much death in the trenches? Has it been designated a teen-orientation? Will we get Lindsey Lohan running about as a female Damien (well why not with all the gender line blurring these days)? Seth Green as Ambassador Thorn? The Olsen twins as two of those three sixes?

It’s not quite as bad as that, although Julia Stiles from such things as Save The Last Dance and 10 Things I Hate About You, is playing Mrs Thorn, alongside Liev Schreiber as Thorn himself. I don’t have any bad words to say about Schreiber, he was Welles after all, although I only saw about fifteen minutes of that film. And Knox Harrington from The Big Lebowski (ya know the art fellow), David Thewlis, is playing that inquisitor of obscure theology who befriends Thorn.

But do not let a few words lacking in the nefarious stance necessary here fool you into thinking thoughts such as, “hey, maybe this whole remake is a good idea, oh c’mon honey, lets spend that fateful day sucking the smouldering phallus of the studio bigwig with nothing more than a mindless brain-dead expression on our soon-to-be soaked faces.”

It’s not the way, I tell you. These guys need to be strapped to the most repugnant of throatily gunk and set off downstream towards the Angel Falls. Only that will cause cessation to their money-obsessed ways. When will the green-factor die? Will it ever? Maybe bloody battle is the only way forward. I can only envision knife fights between a fan of Bunuel and some random yes-man from the upper reaches of Warner Bros. How’s this for profit, a good stabbing in the bronchia? Hey I’m sure that can be sold itself, “New on Fox for this fall season, it’s Studio Middle-Management Deathmatch, brought to you by the good folks who will themselves partake in the brawls within, carnage guaranteed!”

It’s only a matter of time. Let the red spillage ensue!