Movies that are "remakes" but with different titles

That is also the same basic plot as the Jean Claude Van Damme movie Desert Heat.

This was a head scratcher for me until I looked it up and saw that it is also called, “Inferno”, which is the name I’m familiar with.

Blue Streak was a remake of a 1965 British comedy called The Big Job.

Here’s a “nearly”…I worked on the set of the remake of The In-Laws, but that was the third title they went with. I forget what it started filming as, but during production it became The Wedding Party (which had actually been the name of a very early De Niro/De Palma flick), and my crew gift leather gym bag had “The Wedding Party” etched on the patch. By the time it actually hit theatres they’d decided to remind audiences of the original movie and went with the old title.

The Hustle is a gender-swapped remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

ETA: Which I now discover was itself a remake of an earlier film called Bedtime Story

On the SDMB I learn something new every day! Thanks.

See: Post 6 :slight_smile:

I came across it on television a while back. Its sensibilities are surprisingly modern considering it was made in 1935.

It would be unfair to say The Big Chill was a remake of Return of the Secaucus Seven.`It might be fair to call it a rip-off, despite Lawrence Kasdan’s insistence he had never seen the film.

“Double Indemnity” was essentially remade as “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Body Heat” and probably a few more; the Snyder-Gray murder case has inspired a lot of fiction.

Huh, how did I miss that?

Kasdan probably really hadn’t. John Sayles made Secaucus 7 as a showcase piece-- his “reel,” in other words, or as he put it, “You can’t get work directing unless you’ve directed something.”

It was actually the popularity of The Big Chill, and the observation of the few hundred people who’d seen Secaucus 7 that The Big Chill wasn’t as good that got people going out and looking for Secaucus 7.

The next time you watch the Sayles film, notice how it’s all about directing, staging, cinematography, and editing. Every shot has some meaningful angle-- the opening shot leaving you with bemused but enthralled expectations.

And, almost every shot is outdoors-- and even the indoors shots may be location shots-- not in a rented studio (the film’s budget was $60,000).

The directing is masterful-- so masterful, it makes you forget that the dialogue is mostly improvised, and the “costumes” are just the actors’ own clothes. Half of the actors aren’t even professionals, and of the ones that are, only one ever becomes a star, and it’s years after this film.

In other words, it was a brilliant film with crap production values. It’s no wonder people in Hollywood were impressed.

The Big Chill was almost the opposite, and the most talked-about element of it was the soundtrack.

But still, I believe that the similarity was just a coincidence.

When I was in the 7th grade, I wrote a bunch of stories about 5 children, 2 older brothers, a middle sister, a younger brother, and a baby sister, who fought to stay together after their parents were killed in an auto wreck. This would have been about 1978-9.

But I thought the idea was so stupid upon actually reading them, that I put them in an envelop in the back of my closet. I meant to throw them away, but couldn’t quite do it.

When the TV show Party of 5 premiered, my brain almost plotzed.

Damn, look at the Depiction in popular media page here-

I’ll just reconsider this a remake of my post, very apropos of the topic!

This case was every bit as big in 1927 as the OJ Simpson trial was. People were in a FRENZY over it. I mean, seriously, they went completely apeshit. It was a sensation.

What I’ve really never understood is why - people get murdered all the time. There is nothing especially interesting about Ruth Snyder or Judd Gray; they were boring, unattractive nobodies, unlike Simpson, who was a famous man, very handsome, accused of murdering his beautiful wife. The Snyder/Gray crime was stupidly staged and incompetently covered up (I mean, they were TERRIBLE criminals) and the police cracked the case more or less instantly. While the Simpson trial was long and itself wildly dramatic, the Snyder/Gray trial was swift and the verdict totally inevitable.

And here we are a century later and they still make movies that are basically the Snyder/Gray case.

Outland was pretty much a sci-fi remake of high noon. So much so that Time magazine’s review called it High Moon.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the novel by Roald Dahl, was first made into a film called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was later remade with the same title as the novel, and soon to appear as that again in a third film.

There are a few things-- there’s good evidence that Ruth Snyder’s husband badly abused her, and plenty of speculation about what would have happened if the battered women’s defense had been available to her.

But there’s more: Snyder was executed in 1928, and she was only the sixth woman executed in the US in that century, by that date-- and only the second in New York.

Most of all, a reporter sneaked a camera into the death chamber, and took the first-- and I believe still only-- published photo of someone actually being electrocuted.

Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely was adapted for the screen as The Falcon Takes Over and then as Murder, My Sweet before finally being adapted under its original title.

A homage is a remake that the director does not want to be called a remake.**