8. Jumanji (1995)
To my mind, there's only one good movie based around that of a board game, and it's name is
Jumanji. This Robin Williams, uh, comedy (?) was a big hitter back in its day, and told a sort of jungle-based time travel story about a kid who gets sucked into a board game in 1969 and finds himself released almost thirty years later, only to go up against stampedes, evil plants and a big game hunter who wants to shoot him in the head. The implications are horrific, yes, and the movie is very much a product of its era (some of the SFX are dated as heck), but I always had time for
Jumanji as a kid. I realise that puts me in the minority, but I just can't criticize a movie that has monkeys driving a police car. It's my only weakness.
Will The Remake Be Any Good? Aside from the fact that I'm not sure a remake is even warranted, I don't really know. What else is there to say about cursed jungle board games that this movie didn't already? I was going to just write that it's only been 10 years or so since the original, so do we really need another one, but then I realised it's been closer to 20. Which is to say,
Jumanji is way older than I remember it being, and time is going really, really fast. How depressing. Anyway, at the moment Zack Helm (
Stranger Than Fiction) is in the process of penning the script, so you can probably expect this to hit theatres in a few years.