Imagine if all our childhood TV favourites went ‘dark and gritty’
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Version 0 of 1. Nothing, no matter how silly or saccharine, can’t be reformed into some 12A vaguely violent and sexy blue-filtered blandness in some desperate attempt to appeal to the “teen market”. As the reimagined Power Rangers movie coming to cinemas next week is set to prove, in all its rebooted “too edgy 4 u” grittiness. 2017 Rangers’ “gritty” teaser trailer sees five stroppy teenagers (all smooth enough to have come from the High School Musical set) glower at one another in clothes most of us probably can’t afford (styled to look almost-crap), get CGI powersuits, and fight a villain that’s had a Hollywood “race-lift” for no reason other than I-don’t-know. I guess Elizabeth Banks is at a loose end after the Hunger Games films? Or, she just straight-up hates the viewing public? Nothing from your childhood TV watching is allowed to remain in a dusty videotape case at the back of a cupboard, embarrassingly rubbish and looked at with genuine fondness or ironic joy. Sucking the life and vibrancy from the primary colours of your youth until they’re dreary drudgery is a big-screen-adaptation speciality. So what could happen to the rest of what we’ve treasured? Knightmare The CITV adventure game with the smelly-looking set becomes a sicko weekend-Larper getting his kicks by inviting groups of kids into his garage for medieval-themed mental torment. Starring Ian McShane, or anyone that’s been in Game of Thrones, this cheapo riff on the Freddy Krueger “teens in pervert-peril” franchise will be sure to feature luscious actors in their early 20s as the kids who Treguard of Dunshelm breathes over in the Helmet of Justice. Rated 12A for soft suggestions of ephebophilia (without anything definite enough to push this up to the less lucrative 18 certificate, of course). Paddington Bear Not the 2014 CGI horror for children, but still horrifying. Very British, very now – you know the story: a Peruvian immigrant stows his way into middle England with just a battered suitcase, an empty belly, and a willingness to prey on the gullible hearts of the liberal middle-class left. Taking the perspective of the reactionary and xenophobic, this film portrays Paddington as a burdensome benefits scrounger, here to hoover up tax money with a scrawled “Please look after this bear. Thank you” tag around his marmalade-matted neck fur. The finale: the whole extended family comes over from “Darkest Peru” to steal our jobs, leaving the Brown family to rue the day they tried to help an innocent-seeming refugee, just here to tear the British way of life to shreds. Rated 12A for cultural insensitivity. My Little Ponies Taking the slow anthropomorphisation of the 80s rubber ponies to the bestiality-lite levels 2017 requires, the young female cast of Spring Breakers or Sucker Punch are reunited to roll around grassy fields and nose at each other’s feedbags for two hours of softcore indulgence. Spray-painted in pastels, with “cutie marks” stamped on their left butt-cheeks, the sexy humanoid ponies would need a plot, but the film industry can be lazy, so … alien invasion on Dream Castle turf plus machine guns it is. A dream come true for the Brony community. Rated 12A and directed by Zack Snyder. Or Matthew Vaughn. Incredible Games The original Saw (mysterious torturer forces strangers into playing increasingly high-risk games for survival), each episode of BBC’s Incredible Games created a growing sense of unease, made almost unbearable with the addition of giant bowls of soup, and giant games of chess – mainly, giant things. Hoping to fill the yearning for a torture-porn version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids mixed with dinner, this film gets Jon Favreau as a director, and Ian McShane as the Dark Knight in the chess game. Favreau, because he’s got form with creating movies that could have made fans really happy if they were done well (Iron Man, Cowboys & Aliens), and McShane, because that Knightmare reboot flopped big time and he’s got a mortgage to pay off. Rated 12A for the fear that David Walliams will be back to play the guy in the lift. The Mysterious Cities of Gold All the main characters – Esteban, Zia, and Tao – in this big-screen remake of the 80s French-Japanese series are played by white people in matching black leather jackets, because Hollywood sucks. Elizabeth Banks, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hardy, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie clamber over one another for the white-washed roles. The storyline doesn’t matter, because anything that can be whitened-up and completely stripped of its original charm by Hollywood will be (see: The Last Airbender). And the City of Gold won’t feature in this version – it’ll be replaced by another white person. Rated 12A, because those who loved the cartoon might want their family close as their childhood memories are fed into a trash fire. Mr Benn Mr Benn, a privileged, financially stable, cisgender Caucasian man who lives in the west and wants for nothing, is depressed and bored with his high levels of comfort. Leaving 52 Festive Road in an expensive black suit and bowler hat, he heads for a fancy-dress shop where he can try on the costumes of people from different backgrounds and classes that he’ll never understand beyond superficial cultural appropriation. A meta-commentary from the film industry on the casting of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, or performers who take on the role of originally Japanese Rita Repulsa in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers reboots, perhaps – you decide. Rated 12A, so everyone can see that we’re all complicit in the never-ending cycle of garbage pumped out by an increasingly desperate entertainment industry. Have fun at the pictures! |