It’s not out yet, but it’s sure to be a champion:
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
Bad enough, but look who’s starring
Adam Sandler :eek:
Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? But I just saw the ad.
Could anything even come close?
I’d certainly put the new “Mr. Deeds” as one of the most pointless remakes, but for flat-out worst, I have to go with “Planet of the Apes,” because I thought it would be good. Maybe “Lost in Space,” but it’s been a while since that one burned itself into my corneas.
Personally, I enjoyed Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho, but I’ll admit that it stretched the concept of “remake” to the point of absurdity.
Worse than Mr. Deeds Goest To Town and Planet of the Apes :
PSYCHO
I can understand Planet of the Apes . .to a certain extend. BUT PSYCHO. Oh, why Van Sant? oh, why?
For a good review on why IT SHOULD NOT had been remade click to Roger Ebert .
Quote Ebert:
how true. . .how true
XicanoreX
I’ve seen the Van Sant and would gladly sit through it again before I’d be willing to be subjected to Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer, the atrocious musical Lost Horizon, the preposterous The Jackal, the moronic Meet Joe Black, or the detestable Vanilla Sky.
Tsk tsk tsk, you youngsters sure do have short memories.
Don’t any of you remember the 1979 remake of From Here to Eternity?
Or the 1976 remake of King Kong?
While Hollywood is certainly doing more remakes now than they were then, they have yet to reach the nadir of quality epitomized by Jessica Lange screaming, “Let go of me, you male chauvanist ape!”
Since you mentioned KING KONG, I thought I’d throw in the awful remake of GODZILLA – a good pop culture metaphor turned into a derivative dumbass movie.
steve biodrowski
www.thescriptanalyst.com
Alec Guinness fans better brace themselves: the 1949 classic Kind Hearts and Coronets is being remade with (blech!) Will Smith and Robin Williams. I am appalled in advance.
We Godzilla fans don’t consider the TriStar movie a “Godzilla” movie. We call him GINO: Godzilla In Name Only.
The most recent Japanese Godzilla (Godzilla-Mothra-King Ghidorah: Daikaiju Shoshingecki) movie even took potshots at the idea that “Godzilla” attacked New York.
I’m going to cheat and name two recent remakes I haven’t even watched; the live action version of The Grinch and Stallone’s version of Get Carter. In the case of The Grinch, I can’t imagine how they could have improved on the animated Chuck Jones original. But if I had to imagine trying to make an improvement, it wouldn’t have involved Jim Carey. As for Get Carter, in the original a major point of the film was that Jack Carter as played by Michael Caine was every bit as evil as anyone he was fighting. Caine’s Carter was a complete bastard. As I said, I haven’t seen the remake, but I’d be willing to bet that the character was completely reworked before Sylvester Stallone agreed to play Carter. You know, to make him a cold-blooded killer the audience would sympathize with.
The remake of The Blob was rather horrendous.
And can anyone tell me why Insomnia is being remade?
Christopher Nolan has all my respect, as does Pacino (Williams…well, he’s hit-and-miss-miss-miss), but as far as I can tell, the original was not begging for a remake (especially so soon after its release).
Vanilla Sky struck me as unnecessary, as well (though I could be a little biased there).
Which is, itself, a pop culture metaphor. How postmodern.
It was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as the original.
“Look! The blob is consuming a postcard of a diner! Run for your lives!”
Don’t forget Godzilla 2000, which was a not-very-subtle slam on Dean Devlin, Roland Emerich, and their one-hit wonder Independence Day.
Godzilla (the real one) would wipe Tokyo with GINO inside of ten minutes. 
I liked Vanilla Sky, but I haven’t seen the original Spanish movie yet to make a comparison.
There are two remakes currently in planning or production that I’d like to mention:
Somebody is remaking the great The Incredible Shrinking Man. Now if they had a script as good as Richard Matheson’s original adaptation of his novel, with modern special effects it could be (like the original) an involving, exciting drama with a moving, philosophical ending. But I understand it’s being remade as a *comedy. Why, for Christ’s sake?
And this one really hurts. Another Richard Matheson novel, one of my favorites, is I am Legend. It’s been filmed twice, as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price, and The Omega Man with Charleton Heston, neither of which quite lived up to the novel. I’ve sometimes wished it would be remade, but not like this – it’s been greenlighted to star Will Smith and be “directed” (quotes intentional) by… it’s hard to even type this…Michael Bay. The same talentless crapmeister who brought us Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. God damn it.
Does the edit feature not work anymore? Sorry about the bad coding in that last post.
I cannot believe George Sluizer’s remake of his own film The Vanishing hasn’t been mentioned. Reversing the ending was the biggest cop-out ever committed.
Last Man Standing - gangsters in a Mexican bordertown remake of Yojimbo with Bruce Willis. Give me a fucking break.
I’d like to see another film version of I Am Legend; but not with Will Smith. Vin Diesel, Ving Rames, Kurt Russell, Jean Reno, or Lawrence Fishburne; but not Will Smith. Hell, Kevin Bacon would be better. At least then you could work in some kind of bad Six Degrees of the Last Man on Earth joke…
Not quite classics, but the utterly pointless remakes of Rollerball ( stylish, if violent film with James Caan remade as a joke of a mindless action film ) and Gloria ( Gena Rowlands Oscar-nominated performance in the original Cassavetes picture replaced by Sharon Stone? ) never made a bit of sense to me.
- Tamerlane
Good lord, there HAVE been some real horrors mentioned here. I vote for the ghastly 1989 TV remake of the classic 1933 “Dinner at Eight.” Each role was cast with someone as inappropriate as possible, and the original script was gone over with a fine-toothed comb to eliminate any trace of wit or pathos. They even cut the classic closing scene!
As for the remake of “Lost in Space” . . . They just DIDN’T GET IT. The TV show was charming because it was cheesy and goofy and essentially a parody of the po-faced “Star Trek.” I thought the filmmakers should have cast Paul Reubens as Dr. Smith, he’d have been perfect.