The curse of the zombie franchise

Appropriate topic for a Halloween-ish post, n'est-ce pas? (Pronounced "nez pah," but why you'd expect rational spelling from the country whose tanks have three "reverse" gears, to butcher an old joke, is entirely beyond me.)

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, The Terminator is getting another reheating.

What's The Terminator, you ask? Well, back in the early 1980s, a man named James Cameron had a nightmare about a metal skeleton walking out of a fire. This was turned into The Sleeper Hit Of 1984. In a sane world, that was the end of the story.

We were also spared this.

This world, as you should know by now, is not sane.
Cameron wasn't the only one with dreams; studio executives dreamed of $. Now, some people would say that Terminator 2 is a worthy successor to the original. Fiddlesticks. If you want to see a James Cameron sequel where a freaked-out female survivor transforms beautifully into a Strong Female Character (TM) and finds her maternal side, watch Aliens, a.k.a. The Greatest Science-Fiction Film Ever Made. T2 is overlong and overhyped, and the kid in it is far more obnoxious than the kid in Aliens.

Anyway, T2 wasn't awful, in the sense that George Lazenby's James Bond wasn't awful. Other models were better, although they didn't have the same killer soundtrack. But from there on out it was a clusterf*ck.

But since we've dragged out Total Recall and RoboCop, why did you think we were going to leave The Terminator alone?

Ah, good, we've cast the Eleventh Doctor Who and Khaleesi in it, just in case you didn't think this was going to be a major cash grab. Ah well. Matt Smith, at least, is familiar with coasting on nostalgia.

And apparently they're shaking up the story a little a lot. Just as well: a page-for-page remake won't compare to the shoestring budget B-Movie charm and "tech noir" style of the original.