Scanners remake

For all you regular readers who vehemently object whenever another remake is rumored or announced, this ought to make your head explode.

Dimension is remaking David Cronenberg’s cranial-detonation thriller SCANNERS, and none other than SAW II and III director Darren Lynn Bousman will provide the intense staring and brain busting fun, with a script from BLADE trilogy writer David Goyer. The original flick (which spawned several cheapie sequels), perhaps best known for its grisly noggin bomb, was a conspiracy thriller about a group of people with varying morality and powerful telepathic abilities. Bousman will first finish the even more unnecessary SAW IV and his horror opera REPO before making veins burst on the remake, due some time next year.

I’m usually the first one in line at the Complaint Dept. about remakes, unless it’s obvious something new can be done with the material besides exchanging previous actors with fresh faces. But Bousman knows his gore, and the original could benefit from better production values and acting (McGoohan and Ironside aside, Cronenberg’s flick won’t be analyzed for its phenomenal performances). It’s just too bad this had to end up with the Weinsteins at Dimension, who seems to aggressively despise the very genre material they fund… unless your name happens to be Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino.