Sure, no one expects much of a movie remake. Unless you have some really special thing to add- some new angle, it's just going to suck. Who needs a mediocre remake?
This baby, however, takes bad remakes to another level. My jaw was practically on the floor with how many ways and how thoroughly the Robert Mitchum classic was desecrated. This is SEVERAL rungs below being merely mediocre.
This thing sent me into Ignatius J Reilly mode, yelling at the screen and so forth to such an extent that I feel the need to put it down in writing to hopefully exorcise the demonic offensiveness. Please indulge me here for a moment, then. Thanks.
The Night of the Hunter rates as one of the couple of dozen best movies ever made. They packed so much into that baby, a child's nightmare, a Christian allegory, some fascinating Freudian stuff. It is both one of the scariest and funniest flicks ever made, an undeniable masterpiece.
In 1991, however, they managed to turn this into a Lifetime Movie Network flick, with every worst possible connotation. [I'm not sure if it was literally originally produced for LMN. However, it is credited as a made-for-tv movie, and LMN is where I found it.] All the beautiful layers of religion, philosophy and psychology were stripped away to make it into just another story about a mean old man abusing the family.
To do this, they gutted the movie. It's not just that the actors weren't as good. They actively trashed the characters and dialogue of the original to an incredible degree.
Let's start at the end to make some measure of the degree of gutting. They completely eliminated Lillian Gish's Rachel Cooper character- the real, true godly woman who made the stand up Christian answer to Powell's twisted, demonic murder spree. Thus, no adolescent Ruby literally dropping her eggs at the sight of Mitchum.
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