13 Movies That Should Have Convinced Hollywood to Abandon the Remake Trend
There are a lot of awesome remakes out there. David Cronenberg’s The Fly was a masterful film. Gore Verbinski’s take on Ring, aptly titled The Ring, was legitimately frightening. Breck Eisner’s rendition of The Crazies was a blast. Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes was a mind-blowing success. Even William Malone’s rendition of The House on Haunted Hill made for a thoroughly entertaining – even if flawed – affair.
It isn’t impossible to nail a remake, but it is tough, and history has shown us that time and again. For every strong remake it seems as though we get a half dozen that border on nauseating.
I’m not anti-remake in the least. I’ll stand up – with pride – and declare my love for a good deal of remakes/reimaginings/reboots. There’s no shame in admitting when a modernized version of an age old tale displays serious improvement.
How does anyone go wrong admitting that?
I don’t think they do. But that said, there are some remakes that are just so hard to stomach that anyone’s praise or positive declaration of the film seems fishy at absolute best. And below you’re going to find 13 films that elicited some fishy adoration (thankfully, only by a select few).
These remakes are terrible, and no matter how loud you scream to the clouds about how much you love them, nothing changes the fact that these just aren’t impressive pictures in the least bit.
Check out 13 movies that should have convinced Hollywood to take a few steps back from the remake express and instead look to produce original material. As dedicated fans, we deserve a little ingenuity.
Carrie
Where did Carrie go wrong? The script, that’s where. While De Palma’s original adaptation of King’s novel was aimed at a mature crowd with sinister intent written in damn near every scene, Kimberly Peirce’s film, which was written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, was drenched in pure brainless fluffer dialogue aimed at a clearly younger audience. The movie never even approached sinister, and the dialogue was so bad teenagers were shaking their heads in embarrassment. There’s one single scene in the film that stands as memorable, and it isn’t the scene you’d expect. And, to wrap up this quick assessment, what the hell happened to Chloë Grace Moretz’s ability to act? That talent apparently went on vacation while the film was shooting.
The Fog
Everything you could possibly do wrong to The Fog was done by director Rupert Wainwright. The original Carpenter film wasn’t aimed at 15-year-old schoolgirls; it was an eerie film designed to climb under the skin of anyone and everyone who watched it. The remake, which casts super model-esque actors like Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, and Selma Blair, felt wrong immediately. The cast never once worked. Not for one second did we care about these pretty faces, and had the remainder of the film been impressive, we may have been able to overlook that to an extent. That wasn’t the case. Alas, the remainder of the film was no better than the casting calls. The fog itself looks embarrassingly fake, the chills are done away with entirely, and the story is devoid of suspense. It’s just a bad – really bad – piece of work that you can bet left Carpenter feeling so ashamed he launched into a three-day PlayStation binge, shut off from the rest of the world and their accurate opinion of this total stinker.
The Wicker Man
Jesus God, how did it all go wrong? Well, I guess we could start with the casting of Nicolas Cage, then we can move on to the fact that the story itself feels as though it’s connected to the original by nothing more than a flimsy piece of frayed string, and we can go ahead and circle right back to the casting of Nicolas Cage. This is such a shitty film I’m feeling nauseous talking about it.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
There are actually a few good things going on in Samuel Bayer’s remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and while I’ll be crucified for saying it, Jackie Earle Haley was one of those few positives. Haley actually managed to make Freddy frightening again, and his extremely limited comical quips (and far more realistic look) were welcomed by myself and a few others (I think 13 people in the US enjoyed Haley’s performance). The moment in which he’s stalking Thomas Dekker’s character and asks him, “Do you think you can bring the dead back to life?” To which Dekker’s character responds, “No.” “No?” asks Freddy. “I didn’t fucking think so!” That exchange sent chills down my spine.
It’s a genuinely terrifying sequence, and it’s all Haley. But beyond the criminally underrated work from Haley (it didn’t matter who was cast as Freddy to be honest; if it wasn’t Robert Englund, it was going to be deemed an utter failure, no matter what, unfortunately), there are moments that feature amazing atmosphere. The problem is the movie feels like an assortment of random scenes thrown together (I’m sure editing and re-shoots buried this one early). We spend half of the movie thinking Kris is our survivor girl, all the while the completely bored and uninspiring Rooney Mara’s character, Nancy, is the final girl. And, well, she could suck the fun out of a rave with her presence alone.
The Haunting
Holy hell, just when you think remakes can’t possibly get any worse, the memory of Jan de Bont’s remake of The Haunting comes flooding back into the memory bank. This film features the worst CGI you’ll see sans Syfy Originals, and the truth is that it really isn’t much better than those clunkers that do hit Syfy. How you can completely botch a film that features Liam Neeson in the lead is beyond me, but it sure as hell happened here. The film is never fun, it’s never scary, it’s never clever, and even the “brutal” scenes are laughable. I’m looking at Owen Wilson’s death in particular. Such a wasted moment. Then again, the film is just a wasted effort on all fronts.
Psycho
I’m a firm believer that if you’re going to remake a movie, you need to do so for a reason. You need to make that movie your own. You need to find any detectable weaknesses in the source and improve upon those weaknesses. You need to tell a different aspect of the story. You’ve got to change it up in some admirable way. Director Gus Van Sant didn’t give a damn about any of those things, instead opting to re-shoot Psycho scene for scene, word for word. Why in the world would anyone give a damn about seeing Psycho again in color with Vince Vaughn attempting to sell the Norman Bates character that Anthony Perkins mastered in 1960? If you’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s original film, maybe you found some positives in the movie. If you’re anything like the other 99.9 percent of us, you probably hated this wasted effort with a burning passion.
The Hitcher
Hey, remember when Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell engaged in a paralyzing duel across rural roads that ultimately culminated in one of the most shocking finales film has produced? Well, if you do remember that, hang on to it because it is brilliance personified. Dave Meyers, who’s known as a music video director, apparently had never even seen the original when he signed on to film the remake because he fumbles the ball over and over again. The casting is absolutely horrendous, and somehow a story that was once drenched in dread is now borderline comical and totally and completely sleep-inducing. Seriously, if you’ve been having trouble catching z’s, put this shit-storm on, and you’ll be sawing logs by the time the first act is over.
April Fool’s Day
I’m still trying to piece this one together. How in the hell is it considered a remake? Outside of the holiday relation, there are pretty much zero similarities between the two pictures. And if there was something other than the holiday forming a bond between original and remake, I may have fallen asleep and missed it. Regardless, this is one of the worst remakes we’ve ever seen with embarrassing characters, embarrassing dialogue, and… well… virtually zero redeemable qualities. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve already done yourself a nice solid. Keep it that way.
Prom Night
Literally everything I just said about April Fool’s Day can be applied to Prom Night. The original film, which was admittedly hokey, at least has a nice vintage charm about it. It’s also got the lovely Jamie Lee Curtis going for it. The remake, on the other hand, features a slew of generic performers with generic personalities and cringe-inducing dialogue. J.S. Cardone wrote the screenplay, and there may be a reason he’s only written one single script in the last eight years. Interestingly enough, the only other script he’s penned in that time was another remake – the markedly superior Stepfather, which still had plenty of problems to be pointed out.
Prom Night is an outright failure, and unfortunately, it didn’t really need to be. A quality screenwriter with inventiveness coursing through the melon could’ve turned this into a kick-ass remake. Instead we got Cardone in the writer’s chair, and we all know how that panned out.
Village of the Damned
It hurts my heart to include a John Carpenter flick on this list, but alas, I’ve got to be real with myself and you, the potential viewer. All of the creepy atmosphere of Wolf Rilla’s original pic somehow slips down the drain, bound for the sewer. The kids in the film aren’t particularly unsettling, and the script just feels a bit ludicrous. This is the kind of story that worked once but isn’t likely to ever work again. After all, if Carpenter can’t turn Village of the Damned into a modern success, no one can.
Fright Night
For about 30 minutes Craig Gillespie’s remake of Fright Night was engaging and interesting. I’ll never like the slaughtering of Charley Brewster’s character (originally a misunderstood but fairly sympathetic character; a complete douchebag on a pedestal in the remake) that screenwriter Marti “Teenie Bopper” Noxon for some reason deemed necessary, but even still, considering that butcher job, Anton Yelchin managed to make the character fairly likable. And Colin Farrell actually did a damn fine job as uber-villain Jerry. Toni Collette and David Tennant are also in, and while Collette is sorely underused, Tennant is entertaining. But the moment the CGI really kicks in, all the promise explodes in a mist of CGI blood that garnered a collective groan from moviegoers (I shit you not; when Jerry initially transforms and the CGI takes over completely, the vast majority of viewers in the theater either groaned, laughed, or sighed). From that point on, Fright Night becomes more of an edgy cartoon than a quality film that could have honored Tom Holland’s brilliant original.
The Thing
So, how do you fuck up a potentially great thing? You completely underestimate the audience, that’s how. Universal initially brought in Amalgamated Dynamics to get the job done without a load of CGI masking strong practical work. But Universal, and apparently director Matthias van Heijningen, Jr., felt the effects didn’t hold up and compared the look of the film to a production of the ‘80s. Well, dipshits, that’s exactly what we all wanted! We wanted special effects that looked tangible. We wanted to feel as though we could reach out and touch that monster and know what it meant to become assimilated with something so mysterious and dangerous. Instead, the brainiacs in charge of this one went the CGI route, and guess what… it didn’t hold up! It looked like shit, in fact. And that sucks because there’s a lot of strong attention to detail in the script. But a movie that looks like shit is never going to fly with fans.
So, on behalf of everyone who loathed the movie, Universal and Heijningen, Jr., get a big middle finger. Your flick failed because you underestimated us, the fans, who were eager to put our hard-earned bucks on the table to see what could have been something special. You made the assumption that we wanted digital imagery as opposed to real prop work. You decided we’re all idiots incapable of appreciating a feature with a vintage aesthetic, and you know what? For that crime you deserve all the negativity that comes your way.
Poltergeist
This is a tricky little remake that occupies the same space that houses remakes like Psycho. There’s really nothing new to take in, and there isn’t a single moment that feels frightening, despite the fact that the script is pretty damn faithful to the original. The problem is there’s no heart in the film. When Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt both fall completely flat and fail to create any form of chemistry whatsoever, something is really, really wrong. The entire ensemble feels as though they phoned their performances in, and the iconic moments that shocked us in 1982 had little to no effect on viewers in 2015. The movie isn’t outright terrible; it just isn’t good – at all. What more can be said?
