Remakes favorite or least favorite

I was just wondering what some of your favorite remakes were and what your least favorite remakes were tell me why you like them as much or more than the original.

here's some remakes to help you out and to add fuel to the fire:

12 Angry Men (1997)
Against All Odds (1984)
Ben-Hur (1959)
Bounty, The (1984)
Breathless (1983)
Cape Fear (1991)
D.O.A. (1988)
Desperate Hours (1990)
Get Carter (2000)
Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)
Haunting, The (1999)
House on Haunted Hill (1999)
Kiss of Death (1995)
Magnificent Seven, The (1960)
Mummy, The (1999)
Night and the City (1992)
Nightwatch (1998)
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Omega Man, The (1971)
Psycho (1998)
Scarface (1983)
Shaft (2000)

my favorite two remakes are Thing, The (1982) and Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1956)

I'd say the worst re-make of all time is the '83 version of Breathless with Richard Gere. The 1960 original Jean-Luc Godard film is one of the corner-stones of the French New Wave. The Americanized re-make is soulless, pointless, witless and just downright awful in every way imaginable.

Some other Foreign languge classics badly mangled when Hollwood needlessly re-made them: Diabolique (original 1955/re-make 1996), The Vanishing (1988/1993), City of Angels (1987/1998), Jacob the Liar (1974/1999), Point of No Return (1990/1993). The odd thing with The Vanishing is the director of the chilling original also helmed the re-make, yet it's still terrible.

Gus Van Sant's 1998 re-make of Psycho was simply a waste of time, money and resources. It's not unwatchably bad in and of itself, but the very idea of intentionally re-making a masterpiece nearly shot-for-shot is bafflingly retarded. I really love some of Van Sant's work, but I'll never understand the impulse that resulted in this vapid movie. An even worse Hitchcok re-make, if you can imagine such a thing, is the 1979 version of The Lady Vanishes starring Cybill Shepherd & Elliott Gould. A Perfect Murder was unnecessary. Lots of other horrible Hitch do-overs have been done, but mostly junk for T.V.

And I hated Hitch's own re-make of The Man Who Knew Too Much. I think the '56 version with Stewart & Doris Day is a major disappointment, much less impressive than the '34 original. The original is often crude technically, being a still fairly early sound film. But the humor and most especially the villains in that version are so much more interesting. I suspect Hitch was going for some satirical comment on Eisenhower-era middle class complacency with the re-make, but I don't think it comes off. Doris Day completely ruins the movie for me. The actual assasination attempt and the Bernard Herrmann cameo are nice in the newer film, but otherwise I think it's a FAR inferior version of the original, which I still find witty, fun and thrilling.

The recent re-make of Get Carter with Sly Stallone was a travesty from conception onward. There's only one Jack Carter, and his name is Michael Caine. I love the bulk of Sidney Lumet's work, but why on Earth he tried to re-do Cassavetes' Gloria with Sharon frippin' Stone is beyond me. Walter Hill's Last Man Standing is a pale embarassment in comparison to both Kurosawa and Leone. The Chris Rock vehicle Down To Earth is a dull re-make of a good re-make (Beatty's Heaven Can Wait and Alex Hall's Here Comes Mr. Jordan). Babs Streisand's very '70s version of A Star is Born is so awful it's almost laughable (almost). Likewise the '80 Jazz Singer with Niel Diamond is a head scratcher. They needlessly re-made Preston Struges' perfect Unfaithfully Yours in the '80s with Dudley Moore. You've Got Mail was a dumb modernized version of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner.



Some of my favorite re-makes are A Fistful of Dollars (1964 - Leone), Cape Fear (1991 - Scorsese), His Girl Friday (1940 - Hawks), The Underneath (1995 - Soderbergh), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 - Phil Kaufman), The Fly (1986 - Cronenberg), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1997 - Frank Oz), Little Shop of Horrors (1986 - Frank Oz), and Thieves Like Us (1974 - Altman).

But I suppose if I had to pick just one as the very best, I'd go with John Carpenter's 1982 take on The Thing as well.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I liked "Little Shop of Horrors" as well Holden. Great flick, and it kept with the musical tone with those cheesy sets.

I never saw the original Haunting or House on Haunted Hill, but I must say that with the effects that they can use today, Haunted Hill was much better now than it was then.

Gone in 60 Seconds, same thing. Never saw the original, and I believe that the only thing they kept from the original was a car named--I just forgot the name to the car.

I've only managed to see the remake of a lot of movies, and have never actually seen the original. SO, I'm really not much of a source on this topic.

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"I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg

I grew up with "Little Shop of Horrors." Watched it dozens of times as a child, and started memorizing a fair amount of the songs...it's been awhile since I've seen the whole thing, though.

I dug "House on Haunted Hill," but not "The Haunting." I know I'm gonna get myself b*tch-slapped for this, but I enjoyed "Gone in 60 Seconds" quite a bit. I don't know if I can can explain why, though. Just had a lot of fun watching it. It wasn't too ridiculous, and wasn't too believable.

I'm torn on "Shaft." It had it's moments, but overall I'd summarie it like this: story = okay at best, Sam Jackson = the embodiment of Shaft. I really, really liked the remake of "12 Angry Men." It wasn't perfect, but I saw the original, too, and I'd have to conclude the the remake did it justice. Jack Lemmon was born for that role.

As for "Ocean's Eleven," I wrote a review on it (posted in the Reviews section, naturally), which gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I had a great time watching it...but I didn't see the original, so I can't compare it to that.

TWTCommish you should definatly rent Ocean 11 the orignal version it's just a riot and Frank,Dean and Sammmy are just a bunch of super cool guys I watch the remake last night. I thought that it had a big potential to be not that great but I was wrong I enjoy the film a lot after watching it if you've seen the original you will either like it a lot for what Soderbergh did with it or you will be disspionted on a lot of levels with what he did with it am with the first one as I loved what he did with it.

also Gone in 60 seconds was pretty bad all around with a car chase that doesn't even come close to the original.

Holden Pike I like "His Girl Friday" big time but I like the second remake even more "The Front Page" with Walter & Jack directed by Billy Wilder I haven't seen the original only the begininng so I can't compare them all together.
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2011 vaporizer

It wasn't completly wasted time though. I mean parts of the movie, especially the colors, made it somewhat enjoyable.

I say colors simply because Sena chose some very cool metallic colors to use in this movie. Made really good eye candy with some of those cars too.

The new Gone in 60 Seconds is just junk and barely worth mentioning.

The summer that held re-makes of The Haunting and The House on Haunted Hill was sad. The original 1958 House on Haunted Hil had zero budget, but it's one of William Castles best movies, and the likes of Vincent Price and Elisha Cook made it good, campy, Drive-In level fun. The high-tech re-make had a couple good effects in it, but otherwise was no real improvement on the original, which was at least fun in its day.

But the '99 House on Haunted Hill is a masterpiece compared to made-over The Haunting. The original 1963 film, directed by Robert Wise, is a truly effective psychological ghost story, with a knock-out central performance by Julie Harris. The re-make is pure crap, despite - or maybe because of - all the money spent on morphing FX. That movie is painfully dull and cloddish. The original is a high point of the genre, the re-make is an embarassment.


And I didn't much care for Builly Wilder's '70 re-make of The Front Page with Matthau and Lemmon. It's not bad, but it's not anywhere CLOSE to His Girl Friday for me. However, that does lead me to one of the worst re-makes I forgot to mention in my first post: Switching Channels (1988). This is yet another crack at The Front Page, but via His Girl Friday - a modernized version starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner...and it is beyond awful.

I must disagree. It was formulaic, but that's what I liked about it. The coolness factor was high, and my thirst for speed was thoroughly quenched. It's only junk if you're looking for something new and special. If you go in expecting the right things, I don't see why you'd be dissapointed.

Remakes can never equal the movie they are remaking. They either surpass the original, or fail trying.

I thought the acting in Gone in 60 Seconds - by Nic Coppola and Angelina Jolie in particular - was pathetic, and the car stunts were either repetative or, in the case of "the big jump" on the bridge, badly done. Even in a leave-your-brain-at-the-door mode, I didn't find this Gone in 60 Seconds to be even mildly enjoyable. Mostly it was boring.


And I wouldn't agree with that generalization, Spuds. I consider the two Cape Fears about equal, no better or worse than the other. Same with They Live By Night and Thieves Like Us, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Heaven Can Wait, Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, Criss Cross and The Underneath, and the two versions of The Getaway and The Killing.

I do agree that the "big jump" could've been better...but it didn't bother me much. It was still fun. I don't see how it's possible to see the big chase at the end as boring, though. Sorry. It was trying to be stereotypical, and it was. Maybe I'm just a sucker for those "get the ol' team together" montage sequences.

I thought of another re-make I liked, just from this year: Ang Lee's Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994) was transplanted to a L.A. Mexican-American family in Tortilla Soup. Very charming and well done. If it could have generated more press, I think good ol' Hector Elizondo may have finally had a chance at an Oscar nomination.

I liked the remake of Father of the Bride as much as I loved the original. I liked Cape Fear in this manner too.

I didn't know Scarface had or was a remake?!

The DePalma/Oliver Stone Scarface is a very, very loose re-make of the Howard Hawks 1932 classic that made Paul Muni and George Raft stars. The basic story of a gangster coming up through the ranks, siezing power, falling in love with the bosses girl, and being brought down by his own greed and the madness of his ambition is the same, but otherwise there is nothing about the two films in common other than the title.

I think DePalma's Scarface is woefully overrated, not only compared to other modern gangster epics, but especially in comparison to the original film that bares the same name.

Sounds like Blow too. Except he doesn't steal the boss's girl, just another dealer's girl.

Not only is Blow based on a true story, but Depp's character wasn't a gangster, just a drug dealer. Plus his ambition isn't what sinks him, it's his overall lack of ambition and trust in the wrong people that ultimately gets him squeezed out, then a final gesture to try and make things up to his daughter that gets him sent away in the end.

But other than all that, yeah, it sounds very much like Blow.

I beg to differ. Change the word," gangster" in your description, and it sounds very much like Blow. He was ambitious actually...from pot to blow, from G's to millions...you don't get that from being unambitious.
I knew it was based on a true story too. Just so ya know.

Yeah, Depp's George Jung was ambitious to a point, but when he had what he thought was a good family life and plenty of money, he let himself be knocked right out of the business. Had he focused on his business rather than grow complacent with his lifestyle and his family, that never would have happened to him. He would have seen it coming and could have counteracted it. Instead he's blindsided and ruined. The Depp character also gains power not by force and violence and Machiavallian schemeing, but because he stumbles upon the right idea at the right time and is charming and unassuming enough to gain favor with Escobar.

In both Scarfaces, the wealth and power and girls they accumulate don't do anything to stem their ambition, to satisfy, to calm them down. Instead there is a Macbeth type of madness, where complete power corrupts completely, and this causes their empires to fall very, very violently. None of that happens in Blow. Depp's character is a very different type than Muni's or Pacino's. It is Scarface who does the blindsiding, he is the one who forces people out and betrays them, not the other way around.

The central characters are opposites and themes of power and destruction are quite different. I don't think Blow is very similar to Scarface at all thematically. Very different stories, even if the DePalma version is set in a similar milieu.

Holden your crazy dude the remake of "THE GETAWAY" is nowhere close to the original come on buddy I can't beileve you think that. But I heard none of them come close to the novel have you read it if so was it or wasn't it like the movie and is the book good.

also out of the two "Ocean 11's" which one do you like more?
cause I think this falls into the equal catagory.
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Weed Bowls

I like Soderbergh's Ocean's 11 more. The original is fun to see The Rat Pack all interacting as themselves more or less, and in their playground. But I thought it was pretty weak overall and should have been more. The new Ocean's 11 is that more. I like that its subtle and slick, and in a different way it is as much fun as the original - only with much better filmaking and storytelling.

And even as a Peckinpah and Jim Thompson nut, I thought the '94 version of The Getaway with Alec Baldwin & Kim Basinger was just as good as the original - which I think is one of Bloody Sam's lesser efforts to begin with anyway. But I find both versions are strong genre stuff. There are elements of the re-make I actually like better than Peckinpah's movie. I think both are good and about equal.

And yeah, the book is better than both. All of Jim Thompson's stuff is pretty fantastic, and much of it is in print and accessible. The two best film adaptations to date are definitely The Grifters (1990 - Stephen Frears) and After Dark, My Sweet (1990 - James Foley). They are superior to both Getways. And Bernard Tavernier's Coup de Torchon (1981) is damn good too. It's an adaptation of Pop. 1280, which is my all-time favorite Thompson novel. And even though Tavernier re-sets the story in Africa, the themes and tone transplant very well.