10 Bad Movies Hollywood Should Remake As Comedies

They were in on the joke all along.

showgirls movie
MGM-UA

If Thor: Ragnarok showed us anything, it’s that you can revive a flagging franchise by adding a few jokes and sending up the source material. Just lighten the tone, admit that the characters and situations are basically absurd and a fun time is had by all.

Failing that, there’s always the nuclear method: take a half-remembered TV show and turn it into an out and out comedy. That approach worked for 21 Jump Street, though we’ll have to think about Baywatch, CHiPs and The Dukes Of Hazzard.

Given Hollywood’s love of recycling ideas, it’s a wonder they haven’t resorted to parodying their back catalogue more often. True, there was the Scary Movie cycle of films, but they were an affront to all that is good in the world and enough said.

Hollywood never stops making bad movies so the smart thing to do is take the misses of yesterday and turn them into the comedy smashes of tomorrow. After all, who doesn’t want to see a comedy musical based on Uwe Boll’s Alone In The Dark?

For more suggestions, step right this way.

10. Assassin's Creed

showgirls movie
Ubisoft

A candidate for the Best Bad Movie of 2016, Assassins Creed is your typical story about the quest for the mythical Apple of Eden, which according to the opening text crawl “contains not only the seeds of man’s first disobedience but the key to free will itself.”

Before you can speculate on what a comedian would do with a line like that, Marion Cotillard saves Michael Fassbender from lethal injection and hooks him up to a gizmo that transports him back through time so he can enter an ancestor’s body and get caught up in a succession of large scale action sequences. And that’s just the first twenty minutes.

The rest is complete nonsense, a series of action sequences punctuated by scenes where where humorless characters sit around pontificating about apples and free will, but there’s a way to improve it. The only trouble Hollywood is having is convincing Mel Brooks to direct the remake.

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Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'