Too hot to leave the house, so I’m sitting around watching TV. Bad TV. Watched a remake of the classic Night of the Living Dead. Simply awful. Watched about 20 minutes of the Johnny Depp disaster and ruination of Willy Wonka. Unwatchable! And creepy as Hell!
What were they thinking??? What are your worst experiences with bad/unneeded remakes?
Mutiny On The Bounty with Marlon Brando. Yikes!
Total Recall
Robocop
Poltergeist
All 100% unnecessary garbo
The 1999 re-make of the original 1970 ‘The Out of Towners’.
The leads are two funny people, and could have made a decent stand-alone comedy, but not in this re-make, a few funny lines notwithstanding.
Psycho
heh whats even worse is the depp remake is closer to the book that the gene wilder version is … in the original book version everyone except for charlie s family and grandpa is a bag o’ dicks so dahl can moralize on whats wrong with kids today …
Oh my god! That truly was awful, wasn’t it?
The 1963 remake of The Old Dark House. The 1932 original was a seminal, genre-making film with a fabulous cast (Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart and Ernest Thesiger, although the best was the unknown-to-me Eva Moore as the crazy sister). It had real fear and horror, and comedy relief. The remake had Tom Poston and Robert Morley, and was completely forgettable.I could see trying to make a modern version to replace some of the outdated sound and visual effects, but with what they ended up with, I can only ask Why Bother?
I don’t think we needed the 1973 version of Lost Horizon.
The original 1937 version was a fine adventure-drama that adhered pretty well to the James Hilton novel that inspired it.
The 1973 version attempted to take Hilton’s story, and turn it into a singing and dancing musical. Problem was, that half the main cast couldn’t sing, and had to be dubbed by real singers. Characters were changed from the source material, for no apparent reason. The film did follow the plot of the Hilton novel, but while the 1937 version kept the story moving nicely, the 1973 version had the story lurch to a halt every so often, so another musical number could be shoehorned in.
The 1937 version was excellent. Why the producers thought they could improve upon it by turning it into a musical, I’ll never know. The 1973 version was unnecessary, IMHO.
Well, there’s the 1983 and 2015 remakes of Star Wars.
To Wong Foo
I remember the Mad Magazine parody as the cast sung,
The world is a parallelogram without any boundaries.
Nobody knows what this metaphor means
But Bachrach and David are making a fortune.
If you’re talking about the 1990, Tom Savini re-make, I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.
Was the re-make of, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” with Keanu Reeves as bad as I remember? I know I watched it, but I don’t remember liking it.
Oh, Frank Langella’s, “Dracula,” was a steaming turd.
That’s another film that suffered from adhering closer to the original book than earlier adaptations. I, frankly, don’t think Dracula is a particularly interesting story, however Bela Lugosi’s performance is very interesting.
One of my favorite movies is Sweet November, a romantic comedy from 1968 starring Sandy Dennis and Anthony Newley. It is very much a movie of its time, sweet and quirky. I watched it every time it was on the late night movies in my youth. For some stupid reason, it was remade in 2001 with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron. It was absolutely awful with none of the charm of the original and zero chemistry between Keanu and Charlize. They could have spent the movie reading from the phone book and it would have been better.
I’ve heard the remake of “Swept Away” (Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto) starring Madonna was pretty awful. I haven’t seen it, though.
Without that, I don’t think Johnny Carson would have done the “Tibet Your Life” parody with Carol Wayne & Doc Severinsen. The end of which features a rare instance of Carnac without envelopes or the desk.
The 2002 remake of Rollerball, probably the worst remake I’ve ever seen
I didn’t watch the 2013 remake of The Great Gatsby. The few scenes I saw suggested I’d better stay away from it.
I wonder what impression left on the people here who did watch it.
The Red Dawn (2012) remake. Say what you will about the original, I think most people see it as a cheesy but fun movie. However the remake suffers from both pointlessness as well as actually being self-sabotaged by it’s own production studio after filming wrapped, with the modern Chinese invaders now being recut and digitally edited to be North Korean troops. This of course lead to the main criticism of the film, the sheer absurdity of the idea of North Korea actually invading the United States. This was all done because the production company MGM wanted the film to be screened in China so they had to change antagonists after filming, which was all moot anyway since the film wasn’t even released in China.
So you wind up with a completely pointless film with an utterly baffling premise, bad bad acting, and most of all terribly generic action sequences. It doesn’t even have the sheer gut punches or shocking violence of the original film, leading to an utterly neutered tone.
The odd thing is, they really could have salvaged at least some of it, instead of making North Korea the true villains they should have just made it a straight remake of the original Red Dawn with a newly militarized Russia invading the United States with the North Koreans simply part of the occupation force much like the Cubans in the original. All you needed was just film some new scenes of Russians in board rooms organizing the invasion and you can keep your existing footage of Koreans marching around an American town. They even had Russians show up at the end of the movie helping the Chinese/Koreans so it’s not like the Russian scenes would come out of nowhere.