9 Films That Would Benefit From Being Remade
Why ruin good movies when you can improve bad ones?
As the remakes of Cabin Fever and Martyrs proved, releasing a new version so soon after the original isn’t doing anyone any favours. If you’re looking for your next picture, you’re far better off remaking an older movie that wasn’t all that great to start with.
William Lustig’s Maniac (1980) is such a picture, a low-budget slasher that uses its slender plot – an overweight Vietnam veteran scalps women in NYC – as an excuse for the kind of gore-soaked ultraviolence popular at the time. It’s an oppressive, unrelentingly grim film that wallows in its own sleaze and never knows when to quit.
By the time Franck Khalfoun remade the picture in 2012, local government (with a little help from the Disney corporation) had cleaned up New York so that it no longer resembled the city portrayed in Lustig’s film, but that’s not the only change. Khalfoun is also a better director, and his film adopts the unusual gimmick of shooting the movie almost entirely from the killer’s point of view, which makes for a far more interesting and technically accomplished film.
Khalfoun subsequently rebooted another franchise with Amityville: The Awakening, due for release in 2017. Should he wish to attempt a hat trick, here are 9 movies he might consider...
9. Cobra
If even an inconsequential slab of 80s cheese such as Red Dawn can get a big bucks remake, then getting a reboot of this Sylvester Stallone classic in front of the cameras shouldn’t prove too challenging.
The movie has all the cop clichés that audiences love: a monosyllabic hero with a pain in the !*$% boss, a bug eyed psycho killer and lots of action. In this troubled cosmos, we need more pictures with a black and white worldview where you can tell who’s evil just by looking at them.
A remake could also flesh out the motivations of The Night Slasher and his cohorts, who in Stallone’s version appear to want to change society by banging axes together in a warehouse. They talk about the “new world” they’re trying to create, but there’s precious little evidence that it’s anything other than a pipedream, unless the first step is to try and kill Brigitte Nielsen.