You can't beat a great movie villain, and as so many terrible movies have learned, you can't really have a great film without one - they should challenge the hero and, when the good guy vanquishes them at the end of the movie, it will prove their worth. In these 9 instances, we were left with 9 horrendous movie villains who, in future installments, remakes and reboots, were successfully re-imagined in far more terrifying and effective forms. Whether suffering by straying from the source material or simply having been beleaguered by dated effects, these 9 villains were brought surging back to life in their later iteration, bolstered by state-of-the-art visuals and a greater reverence for the source material. Without these 9 movies daring to take these limp villains and elevate them to the next level, they would still be a cinematic laughing stock. Here are 9 retarded movie villains who were successfully re-imagined...
9. The Thing
Retarded: Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks' classic 1951 sci-fi film about a group of Air Force crew members and scientists based in a remote Arctic research facility, who have to contend with a plant-based alien that crash-lands there. Though the film, based on John W. Campbell's 1938 novella "Who Goes There?", was acclaimed at the time, it's dated horribly; the humanoid Thing looks too much like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's monster, and in light of the successful reimagining, it's just impossible to take seriously.
Reimagined: John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing wipes the floor with the politically-charged 1951 version, taking advantage of stupendous make-up effects to depict the alien as a far more complex shape-shifter, able to morph into grotesque objects, and never resembling the dullard humanoid of the original (except when he it is, in fact, using humans as a host). While the original film ratchets up the suspense when the alien isn't on screen, Carpenter's is an absolute marvel of suspense and tension throughout - the director knows how to make the monster pervade underneath the surface and then horrify when threatened.