Who's on First?

Time for a pet peeve: remakes of movies.

I don't have anything against remakes themselves. Sometimes they are worse than the original, sometimes they are better; I'm always willing to give them a try. Although I haven't had the chance to see the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, and even though I'm a huge fan of Robert Englund as Freddy, I will, eventually, watch the new one.

The problem I have with remakes is the title: a lot of times, they leave the title exactly the same. So when I see the movie in the TV guide listing (or I stumble across a review online), I don't know which movie it is. Is it the original Halloween or the remake? Okay, maybe that's a bad example, since there are so many in the original series that I can't even keep the originals straight. But you get the idea.

I just saw some promotional text for Child's Play (the first in the "Chucky" series), and I couldn't figure out why on earth I'd gotten the email. That movie is almost as old as I am (almost . . .). Then I went to the database and realized that the promotional text was referring to a remake (and a potential remake, at that; not all the details have been nailed down, so it's probably not in production yet).

But there has to be some way that they can title these things so that viewers can get a clear picture of what they are buying a ticket for or renting. Is it the twelfth in a series? Is it a remake of the original? Is it a remake of the original twelfth? Is it a prequel? Is it the next prequel in a series after the first prequel? Forget it. I'm going to go play Farmville instead of trying to figure out which movie it is.

What do you think about the whole issue of remakes and titles?