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Somebody has to say it: Enough with the remakes. Remakes have always been part of the movies, and sometimes they do work (Jonathan Demme’s take on “The Manchurian Candi date,” for instance). Lately, how ever, the trend is out of control, especially in the horror genre. Is anyone else tired of a classic horror film being sacrileged be yond watchability with Teen Beat flavors of the month and Marilyn Manson on the soundtrack? Most of these remakes take a classic name and make a completely new and unnecessary film around it. Take “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake. You don’t take a legendary piece of filmmaking and remake it with Jessica Biel. Let’s put it this way: When R. Lee Ermey is in a movie and it’s still worthless, you have a problem.

The recent “The Amityville Horror” was acceptable if wholly unnecessary, but the fad may have reached an appalling new low with the upcoming “House of Wax.”

Submitted photos

I haven’t seen this movie, and I don’t need to. Is it even possible to count the ways this film insults its history as well as the audience?

I love the moment in the trailer when the cast happens upon the House of Wax. One guy picks away at the exterior of the building and says “It is wax. Literally!”

Are today’s horror audiences that stupid? Is the concept of a house of wax so archaic that the filmmakers had to make it literal so Hot Topic’s customer base could follow the plot? OK, then what happens to the house when the sun comes out? On the bonus documentary on the special edition DVD of the 1979 “Amityville Horror,” star Margot Kidder states that horror fans are among the most sophisticated in all of cinema. I used to think that was true. But the quality of the output has decreased exponentially, and almost all of the horror films today are remakes (or sequels) and the ones that aren’t are total garbage (“Cursed”? “Darkness”? “Boogeyman”?).

Even when something original comes along, a lot of horror fans just bitch about it. Take “Open Water.” It’s a terrifying film, but it only works the first time you see it. That prompts people like my friend Dave to complain that he could re-enact the movie in his sink with two bobbing Corn Flakes. Horror fans may be sophisticated, but they’re also impossible to please. Maybe filmmakers have grown tired of trying.

Still, if today’s filmmakers really loved these older films, they’d leave them alone. It’s this kind of uninspired laziness that’s molding a generation that will know “House of Wax” as “that Paris Hilton movie,” and not a groundbreaking 3-D hor ror film from 1953. No sense of history, no respect for the classics. Call me old-school, but I find this shame ful. And it’ll be #1 at the box office.

Perhaps director Jaume Col let-Serra could have saved a lot of time and money by simply digging up Vincent Price and defacing his remains.

The trend is far from over. In the near future, I’m looking forward to ignoring remakes of “The Fog,” “The Wicker Man,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “The Thing,” “The Evil Dead,” “When a Stranger Calls,” and a rumored “Exorcist” with Dakota Fanning as the possessed girl. As long as the public keeps going, they’ll keep making them.

So this goes out to everyone, filmgoers and filmmakers alike.

Please. Stop.

Columnist Mark Tinta may be contacted at letters@toledofreepress.com.

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By Bridget Byrne Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — He’s a family man, evil infant, talking dog and sarcastic alien.

Meet Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Fox’s “Family Guy’’ and “American Dad,’’ as well as the voice of many of the characters on the two witty and ribald animated series.

This day, at a table reading for an episode of “Family Guy,’’ MacFarlane as title character Peter Griffin sings a song about working, works his way through baby Stewie’s biting commentary, and invests Brian the mutt with lively common sense.

He also subs for so many other roles — later to be filled by guest actors — that eventually even he, in an exchange between Brian and Peter, gets the voices mixed up — to a chorus of laughter from some 60 people gathered in the conference room at MacFarlane’s office.

Among them are network watchdogs scribbling notes, undoubtedly marking extremes of sexual and religious humor that may not make the final cut in this post-Janet era.

“We give them a few red her rings that we figure they would take out,’’ MacFarlane said.

Although he wonders why the standards and practices people get so upset sometimes, he credits them for generally being reasonable, “particularly with the pressures they are under right now with the FCC.’’

Fox originally canceled “Family Guy,’’ but has picked it up again, along with his new series, “American Dad.’’ MacFarlane says he recognizes the cancellation was a business decision the network was entitled to.

Photos courtesy Fox

But now, in response to the success of the “Family Guy’’ DVDs and reruns on the Car toon Network’s late-night “Adult Swim’’ lineup, 35 new episodes, along with at least 13 episodes of “American Dad,’’ have been ordered by the network.

The half-hour shows, which got a prominent kickoff following the Super Bowl telecast in February, begin airing regularly at 9 p.m. May 1 on WUPW Fox 36.

“I’m too excited to gloat,’’ MacFarlane says, laughing.

Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, co-creators and executive producers of “American Dad,’’ say it helps to be “twisted’’ if you work with MacFarlane.

MacFarlane says the show’s concept “sprang from the climate during the (presidential) election ... a very politically charged time, with the whole country split in half.’’

He’s a big fan of “All in the Family,’’ which satirized the sharp cultural and political divisions in the 1970s, and feels “that’s what we are dealing with now.’’

A liberal on most issues, MacFarlane co-created in Smith a right-wing character who is “completely the other end of the spectrum.’’ But he says, “It’s in teresting, because by its nature, it does keep us in check from getting on a soap box, because at the end of the day, you have to like your main character.’’

The visual style is the same on both the Griffin- and Smith-family shows — which are hand-drawn in Korea — but Weitzman believes what most clearly marks the dif ference between the two is that “American Dad’’ has “much less non-sequitur humor than ‘Family Guy’ ... We are more narrative.’’

MacFarlane freely acknowledges his influences and in spirations. He’s a fan of “The Simpsons’’ and of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side’’ cartoons, in which the “animals were always drawn completely real. If you look at his cows, there’s nothing cartoony about them — other than that they are standing on their hind legs. But those leg joints are like real cows, only these have names like Warren, Paul and Steve.’’

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By John Rozum Special to Toledo Free Press

This week marks the birthday of one of the most popular characters in detective literature: Nancy Drew, a plucky girl who has solved more mysteries than Sherlock Holmes and has appeared in roughly 473 books. On April 28, she will turn 75 years old.

Nancy Drew was the final, and most successful creation of Edward Stratemeyer, a giant in juvenile fiction. Before Nancy came along, Stratemeyer had already created numerous oth er successful book series star ring the likes of The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Jr., Cherry Ames and Bomba the Jungle Boy among many others.

In 1926, noting the public’s growing fascination with crime and the popularity of adult detective fiction, he decided to graft a juvenile version of the genre to the old fashioned adventure yarns he grew up with. The result was the Hardy Boys.

Two years later, almost 116,000 Hardy Boys books had been sold, and Stratemeyer decided to create a girls’ detective series.

He sent his plot summary for “The Secret of The Old Clock” starring a 16-year-old sleuth named Nancy Drew to Strate meyer writer Mildred Wirt.

When the 25-year-old Wirt , writing as Carolyn Keene, began fleshing out Stratemeyer’s out line for “The Secret of the Old Clock,” she took Stratemeyer’s traditional girl character and bare-bones outline and within three months created a charac ter that any adolescent girl would wish to be.

Nancy Drew became a char acter who is proactive, speaks her mind and is never anyone else’s damsel in distress.

Wirt remained the kind of woman that one envisions Nancy would have grown into. In 1928, Wirt, settled in the Old Orchard area of Toledo, where she would remain her whole life. Three years after her husband Asa’s death in 1947, she married newspaper editor George Benson (who died in 1959).

When she wasn’t writing, Mildred Wirt Benson could be found canoeing the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala accompanied only by her native guides, or hiring bush pilots to fly her to remote archeological sites in Central America so she could indulge her interest in Mayan civilization. At the age of 59 she began taking flying lessons, eventually earning a pilot’s license.

Mildred Wirt wrote 23 of the first 30 original Nancy Drew books. She went on to write a total of 135 books in her lifetime, including the Penny Parker mys tery stories, which she also created.

It was while writing this se ries about the sleuthing daugh ter of a newspaper publisher that Wirt decided to resume her career as a newspaper journal ist. She joined the staff of The Blade in 1944, and worked as a journalist until her death, at age 96, on May 28, 2002.

Nancy Drew still remains popular as parents who grew up with her introduce her to their own daughters.

The Toledo-Lucas County Library has events planned this summer which will celebrate Nancy Drew and Mildred Wirt Benson. For more information, contact the library at (419) 259- 5207, or visit their Web site at www.toledolibrary.com.