Remake (2012)

 

I went the other direction. Clicked on an obscure Roku channel featuring a lot of public domain and very cheap recent movies. I clicked on a movie called Remake. A pastor learns that his wife used to be a porn star and that their 36-year-old teenage daughter has been kidnapped by a maker of snuff films. Made in Minneapolis in 2012. I looked it up on imdb.com and found there's a thriving regional movie industry there. At least the people involved in this movie did several others.

It's a weirdly right-wing movie. At one point, the pastor explains that the Bible says that people who don't work shouldn't eat. There's a long discussions of pornography and they bring up the Meese Commission report (The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Final Report) issued under the Reagan administration. I was surprised anyone remembered it in 2012.

Perhaps now that the internet has taken over and pornography is everywhere--now that every teenage boy is a veritable King Farouk--we can admit that dirty movies might be bad.


So. I watched most of this movie, Remake. I didn't watch it to the end, but I think the mother was going to sacrifice herself in a Christ-like manner to save her daughter.

The writer-director-star Doug Phillips had been a critic for conservative publications.
 
According to his bio on imdb:

Doug's films and screenplays tend to deal with adult themes, but in a message-oriented, non-exploitative way. Frequent "message" themes include racism, greed, and dysfunctional family relationships. Occasionally his films include explicit Evangelical content. More often, an underlying theme of faith is implicitly present but is not openly vocalized.

I didn't know this when I watched it. I thought it was either the most shocking Christian movie or the least shocking exploitation film I'd ever seen.

Phillips is Minneapolis's answer to Paul Schrader. Schrader was a movie critic and film scholar. He was from a hyper-religious family and didn't see his first film until he was seventeen. He wrote Taxi Driver and went on to direct Hard Core starring George C. Scott as a Calvinist father who has to rescue his teen daughter from pornographers. The tagline was, "Oh my God! That's my daughter!" Like Remake, it presented snuff films as a real thing.