I liked Rat Race. It was like a modern, more small-scale IAMMMMW. Not a masterpiece, by any means, but a perfectly adequate comedy.
Grimdark? I’d say it barely qualifies as dark humor.
I feel the same way about the movie. It would never win any awards, but it was funny and entertaining.
Fun Fact: A lot of it was filmed here in western Canada. Not everything, of course, but enough that I could recognize familiar sights in some of the scenes. I also dated one of the Lucys (Lucies?) for a bit.
There’s talk about “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao” over in another thread, but tossing it out here as well. Also “When Worlds Collide” could benefit from a remake. (And if it hits, there’s a sequel waiting to be done, although some modernization would be required.)
How could “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao” be better?
Eight faces.
Considering that all those effects in that movie were done the old fashioned way, redoing it digitally wouldn’t be quite as amazing. Although it might be neat if they hired the people who won the Syfy channels make up show.
How could they make The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao better?
They could stick a bit closer to the book The Circus of Dr. Lao, and add several things the 1964 film left out. And CGI would be better than Jim Danforth’s animation*. And Og knows, anything would be better than the “Woldercan” segment at the end, which re-used bad effects from Pal’s earlier film Atlantis, the Lost Continent.
The script by Charles Beaumont (a great short story writer, and one of the stable of writers who did the scripts for the original Twilight Zone) actually helped the book, which was an episodic fantasy with no real story or connecting matter. Beaumont’s script brought narrative coherence to the story and some depth.
And maybe this time they could get someone of Asian ancestry to play Dr. Lao.
*Jim Danforth was “the poor man’s Ray Harryhausen”. He did the effects for not only Dr. Lao, but Jack the Giant Killer (a transparent attempt to remake Harryhausen’s Seventh Voyage of Sinbad)and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm… He got better – When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was pretty good, and I have no complaints about his work in Flesh Gordon (under a very transparent pseudonym).
Mij Htrofnad. Not exactly NSA level encryption there.
But is Dr Lao really chinese or just pretending to be, since in the Old West, Chinese was mysterious and exotic?
What other ending could it possibly have had? It would have been kinda stupid to have the jets just blow away the Japanese strike force.
Maybe you could construct the narrative better to GET to that point. But you cannot have them win World War II. That’s just dull as shit.
Did I mention I was 12 years old when I saw the film? 
Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the Nimitz take out the whole Japanese task force. In retrospect, that was obviously not going to happen. (If nothing else, they didn’t have the budget for this.) But at the time, to a 12-year old (and to a theater full of Navy sailors), it felt like a cop-out.
It’s still one of my favorite films (as a guilty pleasure). It’s been 40 years, but I still remember the order being given to “splash the Zeros” followed by one of the Tomcats accelerating and its wings sweeping back dramatically. When the order was given, the whole theater cheered.
This almost, but not quite, made up for the cop-out of an ending.
P.S. The reason I call the ending a cop-out is that the whole final act is about the CO of the Nimitz wrestling with whether or not he should interfere and defend Pearl Harbor against the impending Japanese attack. Finally he decides it his obligation to defend the U.S. no matter the place or time, and so commits to engaging the Japanese, when the time cloud abruptly returns out of nowhere. 
The dogfight between the two Tomcats and two Zeros earlier in the film was neat, but it was over far too quickly. Taking on the whole Japanese task force promised to be a whole different order of magnitude.
Jet fuel of the time was a 50/50 paraffin/petrol mix. Hardly hard to get hold of.
But the Navy used JP-5. Less volatile, for the obvious shipboard benefits. Not to mention the additives (such as Prist) that might not be available.
of course, I should also mention spare parts. Need a new fuel pump, radar, let alone a new engine? Sorry.
Fantastic Voyage with modern special effects.
Harry fucking Potter
Oh, yeah, the additives and the spare parts are definitely where you’re going to get trouble.
I remember a short story about a (fictional) jet transported back to WWI France. They fuel it with plain old paraffin, but the problem is that all its weapons system are geared towards taking down equivalent tech planes and don’t target German biplanes, or give it enough time on target for guns. It turns out its most effective attack is just to buffet them with its turbulent wake, or something like that IIRC. Hawk Among the Sparrows, by Dean McLaughlin
For similar views, MrDibble, see: "The Final Countdown": Tomcats vs. Zeros
What didn’t you like about the originals?
Are you insinuating that Snowpiercer was well done? Because frankly, that was on my list as well. . .
“The Scarlet Letter” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” are both still waiting for a faithful treatment. And both would make amazing movies. I can’t begin to comprehend the arrogance of these idiots who think they are improving the story.
I dearly hope it turns out that my #1 on this list will be “The Winds of Winter” which will demand a new dramatization of its actual ending. (Oh please, oh please, oh please.)