I though Depp’s Wiily Wonka captured the dark side of the story far better and matched Dahl’s original vision, the Gene Wilder version is just a bit too jolly. But delightful.
The 2002 remake of Rollerball, probably the worst remake I’ve ever seen.
Thanks for the warning. The original was not exactly stellar, so I’ll pass on the remake.
The recent remake of The taking of Pelham 123… Less suspense than the original, some logic holes in the plot, and none of the wit.
There have been remakes of Cleopatra, Spartacus and (I think also) Ben Hur, which looked as if they were made straight for TV.
Val Kilmer’s remake of The day of the jackal. Moving the venue from France to the USA destroyed the whole rationale of the film
I disagree - Wilder’s Wonka wasn’t jolly at all; he was a grinning sociopath (and the boat scene, while much less effective umpteen years on, is still fairly horrific) right up to the point Charlie “wins”.
The Depp film fixed the problems with the Wilder film (most notably that stupid fizzy pop scene) and ruined everything else. There’s much by Burton, Depp and Elfman I like but this was just awful (although the “flags” scene does make me laugh). IME an unlimited CGI budget rarely improves a film.
Trucks (1998) is more of a re-adaption of the original Stephen King short story than a remake of Maximum Overdrive (1986) though both are based on the same work and the critical failure of Maximum Overdrive is the only reason why they even tried to make Trucks so I feel it counts.
So how do you try to improve the good-bad Maximum Overdrive? By making it a made-for-TV movie so there’s absolutely no budget for special effects, replace the awesome truck action sequences of the original with people standing around in a diner talking for extended periods of time to pad the run-time, and then for the DVD release add in a bunch of scenes that were obviously added after-the-fact because they literally only have one or two completely unrelated actors in them and add nothing to the overall film, just so you have more characters to kill off (but in gorey ways because obviously you can’t show those on a made-for-TV film).
If you thought Maximum Overdrive was absurd, a mailman gets killed by a two pound RC car, a guy in a cherry picker dies but not in the obvious way (for whatever reason he decides to kind of fall off on his own) and a literal decontamination suit with nobody in it somehow takes form and kills a person wielding an axe.
I loved the Mad satire’s comment on the Bobby Van character, “just what the starving masses in Asia need: a third-rate nightclub comic”.
There have been recent remakes of The Karate Kid, Footloose, Fright Night and Overboard. None managed to match what worked in the originals.
I have and wish I hadn’t. It’s truly abominable.
Just to pile on to Tim Burton some more, his Planet of the Apes was truly terrible. Too much time spent on perfecting ape makeup, not enough on any sort of interesting plot (and don’t even get me started on that damn ending…)
Fun fact: my sister is one of the human slaves in that movie. She worked quite a few weeks on it. But you can only really kinda sorta see her in one scene in a cage. But yeah, it’s a fairly crap movie.
The remake of The Wicker Man was an Abomination Unto Nuggan.
++++1 To The Karate Kid remake. Ummm…no karate, only kung fu! I watched a few minutes of Jaden Smith’s “acting” and I had to turn if off!
The Lake House Never seen it, never will, but having and loved the original, Il Mare, no reason to, especially from the reviews. Utter ugh!
Conan the Barbarian
Ok, the original was cheesy, but they told the origin story of the character in about 30 minutes with just a few snippets of dialog. Interesting visuals and action throughout the movie, and James Earl Jones as the villain.
The new one, I made it about 15 minutes in and turned it off in disgust.
It was a real shame, too, because Jason Momoa could have actually played a good Conan - one who was closer to the character from Robert E. Howard’s books than Schwarzenegger’s.
Clash of the Titans
No need for fancy modern CGI. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion work on the original film was fantastic. It didn’t look real of course, but neither did the CGI.
Every King Kong since the original have been failed exercises.
A lot of the ones I would name have already been cited, and I agree with most of them (although I’m probably in the minority of those who actually love the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. For once, I’m in the demographic the director was aiming directly at.)
Here are a few others:
The Truth about Charlie – why remake Charade in the first place? The original film had a great cast, a superb script by Peter Stone, and a great director in Stanley Donen. The remake has a mostly forgettable cast (except stars Mark Whlberg and Tim Robbins), no wit, a moddled plot, and , as far as I can tell, no point.
Zontar the Thing from Venus and Creature of Destruction and Attack of the (the) Eye Creatures – It’s not that It Conquered the World and The She Creature and Invasion of the Saucermen were great movies to begin with – they were b-picture or lower made by schlock company American International on shoestring budgets to appeal to the drive-in crowd. But even these bad flicks deserved better than being re-made on even lower budgets for direct-to-TV release by Larry Buchanan. The only thing they had going for them was that Zontar had a cooler name and the presence of B-move star John Agar.
At the risk of drawing the ire of Harold Pinter fans, I hated the 2007 remake of Sleuth. Everyone involved said it wasn’t a remake – but it’s the same plot, the same characters with the same names. even one of the same actors. It’s a remake. But it’s a remake by a writer who neither knew the original nor knew what motivated it, so all the love of mysteries, the wit, the type of interplay between the characters is all gone. Andrew Wyke’s game-filled house is replaced by a stark barren landscape.
I haven’t seen the remake, but based on the reactions of critics and audiences, (which lead me to not see the remake), I think I’d hate the new version of Flight of the Phoenix. The original had a op-notch cast, great writing, and direction. Here, according to Wikipedia, is the reaction to the remake:
I think you mean the Bruce Willis/Richard Gere remake, “The Jackal”. (or is there a Val Kilmer one, too ?)
I thought this was a case, like many “stolen” names/franchises, that they should have just made it “its” own story - no reference to “jackal”, so that no one would make comparisons to “The Day of the Jackal”. They might see parallels, but I thought the Bruce Willis version stood on its own - a reasonable chase/action flick. I particularly liked the inclusion of the russian woman helping in the chase, during the cold war. (And any movie where Jack Black gets shot to pieces…well it can’t be all bad ! 