Personally, I am of the opinion that remakes are generally surperfluous unless they do one of the following:
- Drastically re-interpret the original source material (be it the original movie, book, play, etc.) in a way that wasn’t done in previous interpretations.
- Rectifies terrible direction, acting, editing, and etc. decisions of the original.
- Drastically re-interpret cinema, be it the genre or the actual cinematic technique.
With my proposed remake, I plan to do at least two of those things when I pitch my remake for…
MATANGO, or ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963)
Original Script Outline:
The story is framed by the off-screen narrative of the sole survivor of a failed pleasure cruise. From him we know the story:
A group of affluent tourists and their Skipper go off on a vacation yacht trip (not unlike Gilligan’s Island’s three hour tour and, coincidentally contains both a Professor AND a Skipper) when they run afoul of rough weather and crash on a seemingly deserted island. The characters are actual characatures: A Professor, his Assistant, a Movie Star, a Writer, a Skipper and First Mate. While stranded, they discover the remains of a research ship covered with mysterious mold and captain’s logs indicating “mysterious happenings.” Above all, they know that, no matter what, they should not eat the mushrooms on the island.
Eventually, it’s found that there is no food on the island, so they wind up eating the mushrooms, resulting in hallucinations, deformity, and insanity, attempting to convince the non-eaters (or, metaphorically, the “innocents) to eat the mushrooms. The overlying themes are Temptation (the players turning into modern-day Lotus-Eaters), indictment of drug-abuse (a relevant theme in the 60s), and changes mores in the younger generation in Japanese culture. Matango is also somewhat a precursor to Slashers (sexual people who succumb to their appetites wind up ultimately being destroyed).
Of course, our narrator escapes to tell the tale… From within a hospital.
Remake Script Outline and Changes:
To make an obvious nod to the original, we will entitle the movie
The Matango Project, ironically titled by its characters within the film.
Instead of a group of hapless victims, we will remove the obvious Gilligan’s Island metaphor and morph our characters into purposeful visitors of this wilderness: A documentary film crew who are there to study a rare strain of the Cordyceps Fungus.
The frame of the movie will still be from the sole survivor, piecing together his team’s documentary footage to plead his case to his doctors and employers that he did not kill his team and using the bits and pieces of his documentary to frame his innocence.
Unlike the original movie, this film will be ground in “reality,” taking actual documentary footage to frame its introduction to both the audience and the on looking doctors within the frame of our narrative.
Five documentary filmmakers are stranded in Irian Jaya attempting to do research on this fungus. Instead of finding an abandoned research vessel, they find an old and abandoned research camp with notes in an unidentified and unreadable language. What they DO find is stop-motion footage:
(We will need to secure the rights to either this footage or similar footage to create the fungus horror metaphor that we are about to reveal):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOQ0VU24xw
The above clip shows an ant infected by the Cordyceps Fungus. It becomes crazy, erratic. Its fellow colonists drag its body and abandon it away from the tribe so as not to infect its inhabitants. Then, finally, the fungus bursts through the ant’s head. Adding horror to this clip is the silence surrounding it.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is what our characters have to look forward to.
When one of them becomes ill, the remaining four are left to decide what to do – isolate the subject? Call for help and abandon the work? As the sickness begins to take effect, the primal side of humanity begins to come out: Can and should they isolate each other? Can they honestly abandon their team members?
Also, in a nice modern twist, the fungus is spread by an explosion of the head and possible transmition of the fungus into open orifices. Talk about a nice splatter addition!
Instead of the themes touched upon in the original film, The Matango Project will instead focus on more modern themes: Environmental horror (how our greed and need to invade nature can lead to our devise; how the environment has evolved to attack not just insects, but homo sapiens as well), man vs. nature, and man vs. The Machine (there is the undertone of complete this project to secure “funding” and satisfy the corporate backers of this documentary).
Cinematic Changes:
Also unlike the original movie, we will shift the third-person directorial focus to the first-person shaky cam perspective. While some critics might say that this medium has been done, The Matango Project will aim to reinvent how the first-person cinematic narrative has been executed with the added construct of the nature documentary. Our characters are professional photographers and will take first-person shooting to a new level with gorgeous, sweeping nature shots of the terrain intermixed with well-framed still shots and, of course, the first-person shaky cam.
Where the original film was shot in the South Pacific, The Matango Project will be shot in Irian Jaya, the northwest tip of Papua New Guinea. The reason for this location is that the Cordycepts Fungus is actually found here and this is still an incredibly remote and isolated location.
In short, The Matango Project will not only re-envision the viral horror of Matango, but also the shaky, first-person narrative film technique.
(Continued)