20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

The original Martyrs, written and directed by one of film’s most unique voices, Pascal Laugier, is one of the most celebrated examples of extreme cinema there is. By contrast, the remake, directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and released early this year, is a hapless, headless turkey of a film, missing the point by a country mile.

The film runs along almost exactly the same lines as the original until it reaches a certain point where it sharply divides, becoming an extraordinarily formulaic horror movie. That point occurs when Lucie, the original kidnap and torture victim grown ten years older and out for bloody vengeance, isn’t immediately killed by her erstwhile captors.

In Laugier’s film, Lucie’s best friend Anna is then taken to be tortured in her place. No one knows she’s there and the remainder of the film allows for no possibility of escape, until the film’s bloody harrowing, oddly transcendent conclusion.

By contrast, the Goetz brothers try everything possible to transform this final act of the film into the climax of a rather pedestrian thriller. Rather than being put down by the sect, Lucie is captured along with Anna. Lucie is the one who is taken to be tortured, while Anna is intended for summary execution.

You realise the kind of movie they’ve made when Anna escapes being buried alive and goes back for her friend, killing their captors as she does so. Martyrs (2015) isn’t an existential exercise in high art and extreme cinema - it’s the story of two teenage girls, closer than sisters, and the action-horror narrative that unfolds around them.

In order to keep some semblance of the original’s ending, Anna fails to rescue her friend in time and Lucie becomes the martyr of the title (in a hackneyed, cringeworthy scene so unlike the original’s powerful, grotesque denouement that you’d be forgiven for thinking they simply hadn’t seen it).

However, if you needed any further evidence that this was written and directed by people with an eye on the teen horror market, you see it when Anna manages to rescue a ten-year-old girl from the cult (thereby softening the impact when she’s too late for Lucie), and when she shoots the cult’s figurehead herself, delivering the most nonsensical, banal action-movie one-liner you’ve ever heard as she does so.

Taking so much out of the ending - including the worst excesses of torture - doesn’t, surprisingly, make the film more appealing: quite the opposite. In 2008, there was method to their madness: the inhumane violence meted out to Anna was always a means to an end, both for the cult and for the audience watching. Here, it means nothing. It’s an end in itself - and Martyrs (2015) is just another slasher movie about the murder of young girls.