Remake Hell

Michael Caine: "I prefer to remake flops. 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'
was a remake of a flop, and 'The Quiet American' was a remake of
a flop." "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988), costarring Steve Martin
and Glenne Headly, was a remake of the 1966 romantic comedy
"Bedtime Story," featuring Marlon Brando, David Niven, and
Shirley Jones. The original "The Quiet American" (1958) was
a political drama set in a volatile Indochina, starring a miscast
Audie Murphy, the babyfaced World War II hero who was more at
home in the saddle in several B-movie westerns in the '50s and '60s.

Hollywood is, as we all know, rife with predictability and cliches. Even that statement was a cliche. But we all know that if Jason Statham is in a movie, he's going to have a buzz cut and he's going to open a can of whoop-ass on a bunch of people. And we all know that filmmakers bank on the familiar for box-office profits. Original ideas are risky with unsure returns. So year after year, sequels, remakes, sequels to remakes, and reboots of remakes are the biggest moneymakers for studios. But sometimes, they can be a studio's biggest flop of the season. And most of the time, just the mere mention of an upcoming remake is enough to irk film purists, especially in the Moviehouse. Particularly depressing is a list on the International Movie Database website of at least 140 remakes and reboots due for production within the next few years.

Our message in the next two roundups of motion pictures in the Moviehouse is this: Hollywood, please stop dicking around with our memories. This past summer, theaters screened three remakes of beloved movie favorites that were best left untouched.

(Top) The original paranormal posse of "Ghostbusters" includes
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson.
(Bottom) The 2016 reboot features four-time "Saturday Night
Live" host Melissa McCarthy with "SNL" comediennes Kristen
Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones.

"Ghostbusters," the 2016 female reworking of the hit 1984 comedy, started off on the wrong foot when its trailer earned the dubious honor of being the most hated preview in the history of YouTube. On a budget of $144 million, the distaff reboot grossed a disappointing domestic and worldwide total of over $229,000,000. These days, a film has to rake in at least double its budget just to break even. In August, The Hollywood Reporter predicted the studio's financial losses would be over $70 million. "Bridesmaids" this wasn't.

The 1959 screen epic "Ben-Hur," itself a remake of the same-titled 1925 silent pictures, was the first of three films to win a record 11 Academy Awards, followed by "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (although several of the categories won by the latter two were technical awards which didn't exist when "Ben-Hur" was made). Among "Ben-Hur's" Oscars were Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), and Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith).

Let's face it, the chariot race in the 1959 version of "Ben-Hur"
(top) is the main reason we still watch the movie. Regarded as
one of cinema's greatest action sequences, the 10-minute scene
took five weeks to shoot and required 15,000 extras. Hoping to
match the visceral thrills of that sequence, the makers of the
2016 version filmed the chariot race (again clocking in around
10 minutes) without computer-generated imagery, while costars
Jack Huston and Toby Keppell manned the reins at full speed.

The 2016 remake of "Ben-Hur," directed by Timur Bekmambetov ("Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter") and starring Jack Huston, grandson of legendary director John Huston, was shot on a budget of $100 million. The film has grossed just over $94 million, earning it the dubious distinction, according to box office analysts, as the bomb of the summer.

Of the summer remakes, "The Magnificent Seven" fared the best financially, due to its comparatively "low" budget of $90 million and the guaranteed box-office draw of star Denzel Washington. The 1960 "original" was a tumbleweed-tossed take on Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa's epic "Seven Samurai," but considering that Kurosawa was a fan of American westerns, who's to say that "Seven Samurai" wasn't itself a "re-imagining" of a Hollywood horse opera?

East meets West meets East meets... in "Seven
Samurai" and "The Magnificent Seven."

The 2016 remake of "The Magnificent Seven," which marked the third collaboration between director Antoine Fuqua and star Denzel Washington (after "Training Day" and "The Equalizer"), was dismissed by critics for its lack of inspiration and innovation.  The picture brought little to the table beyond the racially diverse cast.

Seemingly, the sole diversity in 1960's "The Magnificent Seven" (pictured above, top) came in the casting of Russian-born Yul Brynner as a Cajun gunslinger, Lithuanian-American Charles Bronson as an Irish-Mexican homesteader named Bernardo O'Reilly, and Berlin native Horst Buchholz as Chico, a hotheaded Mexican. The diversified guns-for-hire in the retooled "The Magnificent Seven" include (pictured above, left to right) Vincent D'Onofrio as a grizzled tracker, Martin Sensmeier as an exiled Comanche warrior, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a wanted Mexican bandit, Ethan Hawke as an ex-Civil War sharpshooter, Denzel Washington as a bounty hunter, Chris Pratt as a boozy gambler, and Lee Byung-hun as a knife-wielding assassin.

Arguably, Hollywood's first remake, produced in 1904, was an unabashed imitation of the previous year's "The Great Train Robbery." Distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company, the 1903 original, a 12-minute western shot in the New Jersey borough of Milltown, has often been cited as America's first narrative film in a so-called "recognizable form." The movie is notable for its famous closing image of an outlaw firing his six-gun directly at the camera, which actually startled audiences at the time (picture below).

Justus D. Barnes, who portrayed the outlaw leader in "The
Great Train Robbery," retired from acting in 1917 and moved
to the old Erie Canal port of Weedsport, New York, where he
worked as a mailman and opened a cigar store.

Directed by Edwin S. Porter, a former cameraman for Thomas Edison's movie studio, and budgeted at $150, "The Great Train Robbery" featured Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson in three roles. Anderson was recognized as the first star in the newly born western genre.

Broncho Billy Anderson dies dramatically as a train passenger
in the original "The Great Train Robbery."

Also titled "The Great Train Robbery," the 1904 remake (or rip-off, since films weren't protected by copyrights at the time) was produced and directed by Philadelphia movie mogul Siegmund Lubin (born Lubszynski), a Jewish immigrant from Poland whose Pennsylvania-based Lubin Manufacturing Company cranked out over a thousand pictures from 1902 to 1916. Lubin's "The Great Train Robbery" followed the original's storyline closely, albeit more violent.

Actors prepare to film a scene on a rooftop set at
Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia entrepreneur was not above marketing illegal copies of works by other filmmakers, making him a pioneer of film piracy. After years of legal battles with Thomas Edison over patent infringements, Lubin finally surrendered, and his studio became part of Edison's monopoly on film distribution called the Motion Picture Patents Company.

Over 110 years after the "Great Train Robbery" remake, Owen Gleiberman, chief film critic for Variety, was opining about the "10 Worst Movie Remakes of All-Time" when he asked, "Is the new remake of 'Ben-Hur' a disaster? Let's call it a big mistake, and it's one that illustrates the key principle of bad movie remakes: To really earn a place on the scroll of shame, a remake almost has to risk tarnishing the reputation of a movie we love."

Number four on Gleiberman's countdown is "Depressingly Bad, Borderline Interchangeable Remakes of Horror Films," which are, in the critic's words, "all cruddy and impersonal and numbing and entirely unnecessary," including 2009's "Friday the 13th," 2010's "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and 2003's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Gleiberman stated that remaking director Tobe Hooper's seminal 1974 slasher hit "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" "was like remaking the 'Citizen Kane' of horror dementia."

In "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (2003), Erin (Jessica Biel)
is confronted by shady Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), who turns
out to be the half-brother of the Husqvarna saw-wielding
Leatherface. Ermey, the real-life drill instructor-turned-actor
(remember the drill sergeant in"Full Metal Jacket"), enjoyed
playing evil so much he reprised the role in the 2006 prequel
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning."

Reviewer Scott Tobias, of A.V. Club, commented, "For fans of Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror classic, the two most recent reboots of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (which included the aforementioned prequel)...were particularly painful, almost sacrilegious defilement. Everything that made Hooper's film special - the grimy naturalism, the subversive wit, the political allegory - was slicked up to '00s horror standards, like Creed doing a Johnny Cash cover."

The original Leatherface was played by Gunnar Hansen, an
Icelandic-born immigrant taking post-graduate Scandinavian
studies at the University of Texas. A decade and a half after his
infamous screen debut, Gunnar revved up the chainsaw again
for the grade-Z horror spoof "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers."
With tongue still planted firmly in cheek, he picked up the ol'
tree-trimmer one more time to fend off oversized mutant blood-
suckers in the low-budget 1995 chiller "Mosquito."

The remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Friday the 13th," and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" were co-produced by Platinum Dunes, a production company co-created by director Michael Bay (of "Transformers" fame) that was also responsible for the 2005 remake of "The Amityville Horror," starring Ryan Reynolds, and the 2007 remake of "The Hitcher," featuring Sean Bean.

Bay and Platinum Dunes showed no interest in 2013's "Texas Chainsaw 3D," which set itself apart as a direct sequel to the original 1974 picture, ignoring the previous three sequels. as well as the remakes and reboots and prequels to the remakes. The 3D flick, which cast Clint Eastwood's look-alike son Scott Eastwood as a sinister deputy, featured cameos by Gunnar Hansen, in his last film role before his death later that year at age 68, and Marilyn Burns, who played Sally in the original "Massacre." Burns passed away, at 65, in 2014.

Gunnar Hansen, who originated the role of Leatherface, offers
hardware tips to "Texas Chainsaw 3D's" Leatherface, played by
screen newcomer Dan Yeager, a former cabinet store manager.

For A.V. Club, Scott Tobias backhandedly praised "Texas Chainsaw 3D's" "modest achievement" of "not being irredeemable garbage."

There is something particularly endearing about horror originals that causes fans to regard remakes with distrust and scorn. Take, for example, William Castle, a sensationalistic showman who produced and directed a number of gimmicky B-movies in the late '50s and '60s, including "Macabre," "House on Haunted Hill," "The Tingler," and "13 Ghosts." Sure, they were cheesy, gimmicky thrillers shot on shoestring budgets, but at least the first two boasted the prestigious presence of cinema's Merchant of Menace, Vincent Price, and filmgoers enjoyed Castle's bag of tricks.

William Castle shot "The Tingler" in black-and-white but tossed
in a startling splash of color when a hand emerges from a blood-
filled bathtub. The 1959 film features the first screen depiction of
an LSD trip when Vincent Price hams it up as a pathologist who
experiments on himself in his research on fear.

William Castle's daughter, Terry Castle, co-produced the remakes "House on Haunted Hill" (1999) and "Thirteen Ghosts," both of which were funded by Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company formed by filmmakers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler. The company's name is an homage to William Castle and its initial aim was to remake his horror pictures, but it soon moved to producing films in other genres. Most of the company's output was slammed by critics, notably "House on Haunted Hill" and "Thirteen Ghosts."

(Top) Vincent Price offers his party guests $10,000 each if they
survive a night in his "House on Haunted Hill" (1959); (bottom)
in the remake, 40 years later, host Geoffrey Rush offers his guests
$1 million each if they survive till sunrise. Although he delivers a
deftly sly impression of Vinnie P., Rush insisted he wanted to
look like "Hairspray" director John Waters. It's no coincidence
that Rush's character in the remake has the last name Price.

Critic Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times called the remake of "House on Haunted Hill" "a sorry reincarnation" of the original, while A.V. Club's Keith Phipps lamented, "No one, it seems, dares or knows how to make good bad movies anymore." The same could be said of Dark Castle's 2001 remake of "Thirteen Ghosts," which starred Tony Shalhoub, an otherwise competent comedic actor, as the unlikely protagonist, a grieving widower and father of two who contends with a dozen gruesome spirits in an infernal mechanized house "designed by the Devil and powered by the dead."

(Top) The titular phantoms in William Castle's "13 Ghosts" are,
more or less, played for macabre laughs, like the headless lion
tamer, while "Thirteen Ghosts" offers a parade of bloodied
grotesqueries, such as the Angry Princess (bottom), "whose
presence," according to one critic, "seems to confirm the
existence of silicone after death."

The flash-cutting visuals and aural assault of "Thirteen Ghosts" prompted Roger Ebert to remark, "The experience of watching the film is literally painful. It hurts the eyes and ears." He concluded, "This is a movie that is all craft and little art...The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture." Regarding first-time feature director Steve Beck, a visual effects art director and award-winning commercial director, A.V. Club critic Keith Phipps said, "He's less concerned with entertaining an audience that pounding it into submission."

William Castle's campy films never took themselves seriously. Scares should be fun, which is a dictum ignored in not the aforementioned movies but in any number of horror remakes, including "House of Wax."

Itself a remake of 1933's "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (with
"King Kong's" Faye Wray), 1953's "House of Wax" starred the
inimitable Vincent Price and gave Charles Bronson (top) an
early role as the deaf mute Igor. The in-name-only sequel (with
the head-scratching twist that the museum itself is made of wax)
features Paris Hilton (bottom), who won a Razzie Award
as Worst Supporting Actress.

For reasons known only to himself and his bank, horror movie auteur John Carpenter has given his stamp of approval to a number of remakes of his movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s, notably "Halloween," which was remade in 2007 by Rob Zombie, the heavy metal musician-filmmaker who had written and directed the gory cult favorites "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects."

(Top) In 1978's "Halloween," Michael Myers was portrayed
by Nick Castle, the screenwriter of John Carpenter's "Escape
from New York" who wrote and directed "The Boy Who Could
Fly." (Bottom) Former professional wrestler Tyler Mane
played Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's 2007 remake.

When Rob Zombie, out of respect for John Carpenter, informed him of his intention to remake "Halloween," Carpenter, who was a friend of Zombie, gave his blessing, with the request that Zombie "make it his own." Reviewing the remake for The New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz called Zombie "modern American horror's most eccentric and surprising filmmaker...Mr. Zombie often seems less an heir to Mr. Carpenter and other 1970s horror filmmakers than a sociologist who happens to make horror movies: the John Cassavetes of splatter."

A.V. Club critic Steven Hyden noted, "Boasting more dead bodies, naked breasts, and vulgarity than Carpenter's version, Zombie's 'Halloween' comes up short where it matters most - it just isn't that scary...This latest unsuccessful stab at Carpenter's masterwork just proves that the original 'Halloween' is as unbeatable as its masked leading man."

In 2009, Rob Zombie wrote and directed a sequel to his remake, prompting A.V. Club's Keith Phipps to remark, "Rob Zombie is the greatest horror movie director never to make a great movie."

"Assault on Precinct 13" (2005), an overblown action flick starring Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne, was an in-name-only "remake" of John Carpenter's 1976 sleeper that didn't involve the original director. As well, Carpenter reportedly said he wasn't consulted about an upcoming remake of his 1986 tongue-in-cheek adventure film "Big Trouble in Little China." The new version, classified as "in production," purportedly stars Dwayne Johnson.

John Carpenter did dip his fingers into the remake of his old-fashioned ghost story, "The Fog," when he and his onetime producing partner, Debra Hill ("Halloween," the original "The Fog," "Escape from New York"), reunited to produce the 2005 version, remarking on the DVD commentary that they
had been interested in remaking the 1980 picture. (The remake was one of the last projects for Hill, who succumbed to cancer before filming began.)

The ghosts of Captain Blake and his leprous crew materialize
in John Carpenter's "The Fog" (top) and in the 2005 remake.

Not screened for critics before its release (typically a bad move by filmmakers), "The Fog" was universally panned by critics. A.V. Club's Keith Phipps deemed it a "beyond-unnecessary" remake, part of the current assembly line of horror movies that "only knows how to plug pretty faces into a high concept."

Throughout the 1990s into the '00s, that well-oiled "assembly line" churned out even more uncalled-for horror and sci-fi remakes, among them 1999's "The Haunting" (executive produced by Steven Spielberg), 2006's "The Hills Have Eyes" (co-produced by Wes Craven, who wrote, produced, and directed the 1977 original) and its 2007 sequel (written by Craven and his son Jonathan Craven), 2006's "The Omen" (featuring a cameo by Harvey Spencer Stephens, who played Damien Thorn in the 1976 original), and 2009's "The Last House on the Left" (co-produced by Wes Craven, who wrote and directed the 1972 original, and Jonathan Craven).

(Top) Damien Thorn (Harvey Spencer Stephens) goes for a drive
with his parents (Lee Remick and Gregory Peck) in 1976's "The
Omen." (Bottom) Thirty years later, Stephens plays a reporter in
the 2006 remake. Both versions were scripted by David Seltzer

Director Don Siegel's film noir sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) has been remade three times, memorably in the 1978 version, starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, and Veronica Cartwright (with a cameo by original director Don Siegel). The cast of 1993's "Body Snatchers," directed by Abel Ferrara ("King of New York"), included Gabrielle Anwar, Meg Tilly, Forest Whitaker, and R. Lee Ermey. "The Invasion" (2007), which featured Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and, in a small role, Veronica Cartwright, was dismissed by critics as a "soulless rehash."

"You're next! You're next!" warns Kevin McCarthy in the original
"The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and, 22 years later, in the
remake, directed by Philip Kaufman ("The Right Stuff").

In the early 2000s, Mark Wahlberg starred in a string of three remakes, or, as he called them, "re-imaginings": "Planet of the Apes," directed by Tim Burton (with cameos by 1968 costarsl Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison); director Jonathan Demme's "The Truth About Charlie," a loose remake of director Stanley Donen's tongue-in-cheek Hitchcockian thriller "Charade" (dubbed by one writer "the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made"), which starred Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy; and "The Italian Job," inspired by the swinging '60s British caper flick featuring Michael Caine and a trio of feisty Mini Cooper S getaway cars.

"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"
Thirty-three years after starring in "Planet of the Apes,"
Charlton Heston played one of those damned dirty apes
in the remake (pictured here with director Tim Burton).

As for the future of scary remakes, we quote Marlon Brando from "Apocalypse Now": "The horror...the horror..." Pre-production plans are underway for remakes of "An American Werewolf in London," "Pet Sematary," "Creature from the Black Lagoon," and "The Blob," directed by Simon West ("The Expendables 2") and starring Samuel L. Jackson, as well as, yes, another round of reboots of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th." We're very scared.


To be continued...but not remade...