Film remakes: threat or menace?

[madbaker]

So, I read on Sluggy the other day that the Sci-Fi channel is doing a remake of Battlestar Galactica.

After the shudder fit stopped, I formed a postulate:

Remakes are a bad thing.

No, seriously. I can only think of a couple that have not been a waste of celluloid and money: The Maltese Falcon with Bogart, and The House of Wax with Vincent Price (which was a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum).

Comments welcome. Since it's my postulate, I'm setting the ground rules to allow valid comparisons:

1. The remake must be substantially the same as the original.

Kevin Costner's Prince of Feebs doesn't count because they made huge changes. (Costner made Robin a crusader, among many others.)

2. The remake must be done in the same language.

A U.S. film that is a reworking of a French film doesn't qualify. (Although, again, I have yet to see one that even lives up to the original. Sommersby, a remake of The Return of Martin Guerre, violates both these rules as it went from French to English, and changed the setting from the Middle Ages to the Civil War.)

3. The remake must be a film of a film.

Remakes of TV series don't count. (Although they don't invalidate the theory - I mean, Scooby Doo, Charlie's Angels, and The Brady Bunch aren't exactly masterworks.)

I'm aware that if you include TV movies, the record is slightly better -- Patrick Stewart's remakes of Moby Dick and A Christmas Carol are pretty good. So I'm sticking with my original rules.

Comments

Re: Indeed...

[seamoose.livejournal.com]

Caught out in a mistake. Okay, I specified GB&U as the remake of Yojimbo, I should have said that the whole trilogy is a copy of the Yojimbo (plural) movies. Nightshade is correct in that Fistfull of Dollars is the direct remake.

As to Rungu, etc., I have been told that the German one is the best of them.