20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

Remaking a classic noir thriller - let alone one as important to the genre’s history as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) - is fraught with all kinds of peril. Do you assume no one’s seen the original, remake it pound for pound and risk being called derivative? Do you try and do something a little different with it and risk alienating the people who loved the original?

Or do you gamble everything by shooting the worst possible cover version of the original? That’s the ingenious solution seized by Jeremiah Chechik, based upon Don Roos’ horrible, horrible screenplay - although, to be fair to Roos, who isn’t a slouch when it comes to movie-making, it’s possible that he was rewritten by a room full of sh*tflinging monkeys and unfortunate enough to have his name left on the script.

It’s baffling that the best word to describe this movie - one that remakes such a groundbreaking, fascinating film - is ‘uninspired’, but that’s the long and the short of it. Sharon Stone isn’t badly cast as the brittle, no-nonsense mistress who conspires with her sadistic lover’s wife to kill him. Unfortunately, her solution to being saddled with all that nauseatingly toxic dialogue is to ham it up like she’s in panto, dressed like a colourblind Sunday School teacher.

To make matters much, much worse, Chechik chooses to mess with the ending. Les Diaboliques is famous for having one of the first significant twist endings in cinema, and it still holds up today: it’s one of those brilliant climaxes that changes the way you think about the movie you’ve just watched.

Chechik clearly chickened out of replicating that feat, and instead decided to plump for a variation on that ending that gives Stone’s character a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s the final nail in the coffin… well, that and the title.

You see, ‘Les Diaboliques’ means ‘the fiends’, whereas ‘Diabolique’ just means ‘diabolical’.