Did you ever wonder why no one had remade the 1945 Boris Karloff movie Isle of the Dead? Me, either. But the folks at RKO Pictures are trying to help everyone remember that they used to be a great studio and they aren’t going to do that with movies like Are We Done Yet?. Instead, they are going to remake some of their own pictures from the distant past. What Variety calls “repurposing its library” and what the rest of us might call exploiting a known entity to foist drivel on the public.
Regardless of what you call it, writers Brian Horiuchi and Matt Lazarus call it a paycheck. They are going to write the remake’s script and can reportedly lift a sleeper couch over their heads when working in tandem. I made up that second part. It’s hard to tell how they will do since they don’t have any recognizable credits, but they have decided to change the location from a Greek Island to Afghanistan.
The original movie starred Karloff as a Greek military commander who quarantines the titular island after a plague breaks out. The residents begin to die but some want to blame a vampire-demon for the deaths. It was produced by Val Lewton who made several of these well-received horror films for RKO in the 40’s including Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see that this is not going to restore RKO to their former glory.
