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USA: Jeff Tremaine, 2002

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USA/UK/Romania: Don Mancini, 2004

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USA: Jay Roach, 1999

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USA: John Musker/Ron Clements, 1992

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USA: Alexandre Aja, 2006

Briefly:

- It's more gory than the original.
- It's more glossy than the original.
- It's less effective than the original.

It's not a bad film, but it's pretty much a scene by scene retread of its predecessor, with some additions (a tacky back-story for the cannibals, who are now mutants) and minor changes (the cannibals' hide-out, details of the climax). As such, there's not much here for those who've already seen Wes Craven's nasty little 1977 shocker, beyond prettier faces, smoother photography and goopier blood.

Like the original, the thing takes its time to get up and running, although unfortunately the attempts to build tension in the first half are never particularly successful. The characters are by and large uninteresting (not that this wasn't true of its predecessor), and the cannibals are devoid of personality (which wasn't true of the original - where's Michael Berryman when you need him?). It's also unintentionally funny in places, and the monster make-up is decidedly hokey, looking more like the cannibals are wearing rubber masks than actually disfigured.

Given the promise director Alexandre Aja showed with Haute Tension, it's something of a disappointment that his first feature in the US is a remake, and a rather uninspired one at that. It's about the same standard as 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake, and if you enjoyed that, you might get a kick out of this. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot on offer here. For my money, Wrong Turn did a slightly better job of taking the "backwoods cannibal exploitation" format and applying it to the 21st century.

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USA: Barry Cook/Tony Bancroft, 1998

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USA/UK: Richard Donner, 1976

(Watched with commentary by Richard Donner and Brian Helgeland)

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UK/USA: Ridley Scott, 2005/2006

In short: yes, it's better than the theatrical cut. No, it doesn't transform it into a timeless masterpiece.

The 3-hour director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven is, simply put, the film that should have been released in cinemas from the outset. With hindsight, the theatrical cut is a shambolic mess that garrottes the character arc of the lead and transforms all the side characters into useless puppets. Quite how Ridley Scott signed off on such a confused, cack-handed edit is anyone's guess, but at least the availability of this expanded edition on DVD puts right some of the wrongs.

Unlike Gladiator, the film to which Kingdom of Heaven is most often compared, this is not one man's quest for vengeange, and, as such, the events of the film play out on a much larger stage in which the protagonist, Balian (Orlando Bloom in a surprisingly half-decent performance - his first... that I've seen, at any rate), is only a small part of the bigger picture. The theatrical cut tries to turn the film into a Gladiator-style personal action movie, which is, in my opinion, why it fails. In the director's cut, you're never under the impression that Balian's is the only important story, thanks to the way in which the script takes care to build up the back-stories and dilemmas of the various other personalities. In particular, Eva Green, the talented French actor who got incredibly short shrift in the previous version, gets much more to do here and actually justifies her top billing along with Bloom.

Ultimately, although I don't normally like 3-hour films, this is one instance in which the length is completely justified. Oh, and I must confess to being slightly surprised that Fox, of all studios, put out a film that portrays the Muslims as considerably more honourable people than the Christians. Was Rupert Murdoch on holiday when this project was commissioned or something?

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USA: Ben Sharpsteen/Hamilton Luske/Bill Roberts/Norman Ferguson/Jack Kinney/Wilfred Jackson/T. Hee, 1940

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USA: Len Wiseman, 2006

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