8:25AM Defamer Hollywood | Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our acute grief at
the news of Short Circuit Redux,
LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez today
mulls over the pandemic of horror glutting the marketplace. With this week’s release of
Prom Night leading the way, Fernandez counts more than a dozen do-overs en route to theatres, including the certain evisceration of classics like
Friday the 13th,
The Birds and
Near Dark; a Stanford professor deigns to comment that audiences can’t be bothered to think and dread at the same time, so they take comfort in the familiar. Kind of like Fernandez himself, in a way, who latched on to our
Short Circuit distress by reworking our “End of Ideas” tag for a lede (”Smell that? It’s the decay of original ideas”), citing stars Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy being “at the height of their powers” (we said they were “in top form”) and hitting the 1986 original’s
IMDB Quotes page to flesh out our mutual concern over Fisher Stevens’ garish Indian stereotype. We feel your pain, Jay — but you already knew that, didn’t you? [
LAT]
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