The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Remakes are previous cinematic works that are given a new interpretation. Almost always the works being remade are popular works in a previous era that have stayed in the public imagination. A remake is an attempt to revitalise the property for a new era.
A remake will update an older work, changing many of the references for a contemporary relevance. It will offer more sophisticated effects and contemporary stars. It is common in films of the late 2010s/2020s for older works to be remade with some of the leading roles gender-flipped or raceswapped. In the majority of cases, the remake fails to have the effect the original had on audiences in that the earlier work was very much a phenomenon that belonged to its era, although there are some exceptions.
It is also worth discussing a remake vs an adaptation. We usually talk about remakes applying to previous successful cinematic works. However, when we refer to a work that was popular before becoming a film or there have been multiple film versions, a new film version is simply referred to as a new adaptation. Nobody ever talks about a remake of Hamlet (1603) or Pride and Prejudice (1813), for instance.
Variants include popular tv series being given film remakes – see Based on TV, or popular foreign-language films being given English-language remakes – see English-Language Remakes. Other types of remakes include animated films and tv being remade in live-action – see Animation in Live-Action.
A side piece of terminology that has come into use in the 2000s is the idea of a reboot where a popular ongoing series is usually revived and reworked in some way or simply an ongoing series is given a new actor and/or a continuity reset.
Slick well made film that successfully transplants the vampire to modern suburbia. Made with a top-drawer arsenal of effects, including taking a leaf from An American Werewolf in London and showing a detailed man into bat transformation
Another 1980s horror remake that had much potential. However, this proves to be just another Friday the 13th film by the numbers, albeit with a bigger budget, and widely misses the mark
A copy of John Carpenter’s Halloween that proved a big success and spawned a long-running series of sequels. Both films created the slasher film, which came to overrun horror in the 1980s, although this is a cruder film than Halloween
The fourth film version of the Disney comedy about a mother and daughter who swap bodies for one day. This was made for the Disney Channel and comes as a grating teen musical
Enjoyable remake of the 1970s Disney comedy about a mother and daughter who swap bodies. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan nail the swapped roles to perfection
The original version of the Disney live-action comedy with mother Barbara Harris and a young Jodie Foster as her daughter who swap bodies for one day. The performances are hilarious and this is filled with witty deadpan gags
One of the worst among the 2000s fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. John Carpenter’s 1980 original has been transformed into a teen horror film where the spookiness collapses into frequently ridiculous shock effects
John Carpenter’s immediate successor to Halloween is a suspenseful and scary ghost story about undead sailors descending on a small town in a fog bank, even if the narrative logic holding everything together is thin
Tsui Hark, a key figure of the modern Wu Xia cycle, makes a lushly extravagant, Chinese-backed flying swordsman epic. Featuring a wide canvas of characters who come together in a series of very entertaining playoffs
David Cronenberg remakes the 1958 film, transforming its improbable scenario into a fascinating study of biological transformation with Jeff Goldblum genetically mutating into a fly hybrid. Kafka’s Metamorphosis with a lot more slime.
A teleporter accident causes a scientist to swap head and arm with a fly. This requires you to suspend believability but is otherwise one of the classic monster movies of the era. Several sequels and a remake followed.
Remake of Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor where the charms of the original are buried under an excess of twee – where the professor now gets a cute robot assistant and the flubber becomes sentient
Another remake we never asked for. Considering that this had the entire CGI revolution to conceive of the afterlife journey and merely has to top Joel Schumacher, it is amazing how dull and uninteresting this emerges as
A film about med students stopping their hearts so as to explore the afterlife. This aims for big ideas but befalls director Joel Schumacher who delivers pretty visuals but finds nothing any more profound than a figurative group hug
The third of the Flash Gordon serials, not quite at the heights of the previous two but with a colour and exoticism that was head and shoulders above the other serials of the era
Dino de Laurentiis climbed aboard the Star Wars fad with this remake of the classic serial. Against expectation, the film’s campy tone and eye-popping sets and costumes work and it has become an audience favourite
The original and greatest of all SF serial adventures and a huge influence on George Lucas. Despite the primitive effects, this still has a marvellously rousing imagination that stands up today. Two serial sequels followed
One of Stephen King’s best books is given a new film workover by Blumhouse. Keith Thomas made a standout directorial debut with The Vigil, but this is a disaster, one of the worst of all King adaptations
The adaptation of the Stephen King novel with Drew Barrymore giving a fantastic performance as a young girl with pyrokinetic powers on the run as she is hunted by a sinister government agency
One Cut of the Dead was one of the freshest takes on the overworked zombie film in recent years. Here Academy Award-winning director Michel Hazanavicius conducts a French remake but misses the mark
Live tv broadcast remake of the 1960s Cold War nightmare about an accidental nuclear release over Russia, now with an all-star cast. This proves far more suspenseful and expertly played than one might have thought
Work of incredibly stark tension set amidst post-Cuban Missile Crisis nuclear anxieties with the US trying to recall a bomber that has been accidentally dispatched to drop an atomic bomb on Moscow
An English-language remake of the ghost story from the Pang Brothers follows the other film faithfully but in terms of atmosphere is a pallid copy of the original
Larry Buchanan must count as one of the all-time bad movie directors and in this ultra-cheap alien invader film, in itself a remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), he is true to form
Thailand’s Pang Brothers proved themselves some of the best horror directors in the world with this eerie film in which a woman starts to see the dead after receiving corneal implants. Several sequels and an English-language remake followed
One of the few remakes of the 00s/10s that delivers the goods. While messing around with the plot set-up with mixed results, this quickly goes for broke to create a satisfying show on most accounts
Ferociously paced low-budget hit that put the names of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on the map. What made the film a cult hit was Raimi’s full tilt pace and entertainingly over-the-top splatter effects
Disney live-action film with two psi-powered kids on the run. A popular hit that seems to have been mostly construed around a series of novelty effects set-pieces
This is a Canadian-made remake of the Alyssa Milano-starring erotic vampire film The Nosferatu Diaries: Embrace of the Vampire. For some reason, this is now minus the erotica and emerges as tepid
A film remake of one of the great tv series of the 1980s. A complete betrayal by the original’s director Martin Campbell that strips all the politics and simply makes it into a Mel Gibson revenge film
One of the great tv series of the 1980s, a powerful and incisive snapshot of Thatcherite England, the backroom politics of the nuclear power industry and the environmentalist movement. A brilliantly written show featuring great performances
Filipino ghost story inspired by The Ring and Ju-on films that generates a reasonable haunted atmosphere in its story about mysterious happenings in an apartment building. This later underwent an English-language remake
Claude Chabrol updates Fritz Lang super-villain Dr Mabuse to a millennial West Berlin where Alan Bates is a tv mogul who masterminds a mass suicide cult via messages hidden inside advertising
The original The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a classic of silent German Expressionist cinema; this loose remake feels like Eraserhead reconceived with absurd Day-Glo disco decor
Remake of Heaven Can Wait/Here Comes Mr Jordan as a vehicle for comedian Chris Rock where the heavenly body mix-up now becomes about a black man ending up in a white man’s body
Guillermo Del Toro produced cinematic remake of a 1970s tv movie, this creates a good deal of creepy mood and atmosphere with Katie Holmes as a mother who finds goblins in the cellar, but never pushes any of it in a way that jolts audiences in their seats
Complete and utter bastardisation of Hugh Lofting’s charming Doctor Dolittle stories, which are turned into a modern comedy with Eddie Murphy and talking animals doing lots of pee and poop jokes
This gets the nonsensical absurdity of the original Doctor Dolittle stories far more than the Eddie Murphy version. On the other hand, this was the era of Mary Poppins and this is made as a lumbering musical
A South Korean film that came out around the same time as Frequency and has an almost identical premise about two people who start talking by radio while separated in time by twenty years.
Classic French psycho-thriller that is gripping in its psychological games before reaching an unforgettable twist ending. It has been twice remade and its plot much imitated by others but never bettered
A remake of the great and underrated film and Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief who constantly outwits the authorities, this comes with style and wit to spare and strikes the note perfectly
Classic 1970s porn film about a spinster condemned to Hell who is sent back to the world to experience the lusts of the flesh. Made back at a time when the people involved seemed to care about making a good film as well
An uncredited remake of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer, this is the single worst film I have seen in the last few years. It is surely the horror equivalent of The Room
The second film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a psycho-thriller made for Roger Corman where Coppola shows the glimmerings of style that made him a major director a decade later
A remake of the popular 1980s sword and sorcery film that was originally produced by Roger Corman. This version is directed by makeup effects artist Steven Kostanski who fills it with an amazing range of creature effects
Eli Roth’s remake of the classic Charles Bronson vigilante film is an ugly affair. In an era where school shooting are a weekly scourge in the US, do we really need another fantasy about one man becoming empowered and sorting things out with a gun?
Classic fantasy film in which Death takes human form to visit a party and experience the human condition. Frederic March gives us Death as a comically eccentric outsider and the film has some great moments of imagination
Death Race 2000 was a hit for producer Roger Corman. It was remade minus the satire as a straight action film with Death Race; here Corman remakes the original (albeit very cheaply) and restores the satire
Satiric hit produced by Roger Corman, a spoof of Rollerball, with David Carradine as a driver in a futuristic road race where points are won by running down pedestrians. Also featuring a young unknown Sylvester Stallone
David Cronenberg adapts a Stephen King novel with Christopher Walken waking from a coma with clairvoyant abilities. An okay film if one that lacks the personal intensity and rich themes of Cronenberg’s original works
An interesting if uneven remake of the 1950s SF classic from Scott Derrickson that smartly updates the story from the Atomic Age to a post-9/11 era where it now delivers a modern environmental warning
A classic of the 1950s Golden Age of SF, featuring Michael Rennie as an alien visitor film who comes to make a warning about the need to make peace. This stands at the start of the Atomic Age with a stark urgency
One of a growing industry of zombie films that leech off the George Romero name. This remakes Romero’s Day of the Dead, which means it cherry picks key elements and rearranges them in a different way but lacks everything else that Romero offered
A remake of George Romero’s third and most underrated zombie film, This came out as part of the 2000s revival of the genre but majorly miscalculates the original and emerges as wrong in just about every way
The third and most undervalued of George Romero’s original trilogy of zombie films, an explosively bared to the bone series of apocalyptic confrontations containing some of the best performances and writing in any of his films
Zack Snyder debuts with a remake of the cult George Romero film. While this has a bigger budget, it is missing is the satire and gore-drenched effects that made the original memorable. This inspired the mid-2000s zombie film revival
George Romero’s successor to his cult hit of Night of the Living Dead. Romero creates a very different film, one that takes place in a mall and comes with a level of droll satire. A bigger budget allows him to push things to gore-drenched extremes
Hideo Nakata made the highly influential Ringu but his other films have been uneven. This ghost story is one of his few follow-ups that comes near recapturing the same uncanny mood
Larry Buchanan was a director whose output rivalled Edward D. Wood Jr in quality. This film about an expedition into the bayous encountering a mad scientist creating human-crocodile hybrids registers fairly poorly on most counts
Japanese remake of the Vincenzo Natali film where a group of people wake up in mysterious labyrinth of identical cubed rooms filled with death traps
An excellent conceptual SF film, a directorial debut for Vincenzo Natali with six people trapped in a labyrinth of identical rooms some of which contain death traps where they must solve the puzzle to find the way out
The original The Crow is a cult classic. This long-planned remake from the perpetually terrible Rupert Sanders was an ill-advised move from every angle that gets just about everything from the mood to the conception of its character wrong
Overshadowed by the tragedy of star Brandon Lee’s death on set, this is a beautifully dark and glistening Gothic tale of a murdered youth revived from the dead to attain vengeance against his killers. Several lesser sequels followed
George Romero’s underrated classic gets a makeover amid the 00/10s fad for remakes of 70s/80s horror films. Alas, Romero’s modest classic about a madness-inducing biospill has a big-budget thrown to emerge as just another zombie film
George Romero’s most underrated film, filled with disturbing images as the population of a town are driven crazy by a bio-weapon spill The first and also the best of a number films on the theme of outbreaks of mass insanity
One of a spate of Disney live-action comedies that was successful enough that it spawned two sequels. A young Kurt Russell is a college student who gets the contents of a computer accidentally transferred into his head
TV mini-series remake of the Michael Crichton medical thriller that pointlessly changes and over-extrudes a tight and effective original, while director Mikael Salomon adds absurd red herrings and keys away major surprises well in advance
Flush from the success of The Andromeda Strain and Westworld, Michael Crichton directed this medical conspiracy thriller, which returns to the fear of science themes that runs throughout his work
Heavily disappointing remake of the Ray Harryhausen film where the replacement of Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation with CGI fails to achieve any magic
This would be the last of the films made by stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen where he turns his creations towards conducting another Greek Mythology adventure. With an all-star cast playing the Greek gods.
A Chinese Ghost Story was one of the greatest Hong Kong fantasy films; this remake gets everything wrong. The aerial combat scenes are replaced by CGI, the characters rewritten and the Buddhist elements eliminated
My introduction to Wu Xia – imagine some vision of Kwaidan as directed by Sam Raimi, filled with sensationally beautiful and out of this world imagery and completely nutsoid fantastical battles with ghosts and demons
The controversial remake of Child’s Play where Chucky is no longer possessed but become an artificially intelligent smart toy. This seems to misconstrues everything that the fanbase of the series celebrates by a mile
This remake of the Stephen King short story (this time with a script from King himself) is a much better film than the earlier 1984 version or any of its numerous sequels
A fifteen page Stephen King story about a patricidal child cult has spawned this film, nine sequels and a remake. Not a very good film, this is stuck with padding a very slight original out to a full-length film
A classic animated film. A delightful film about a young pig that seeks to change his fate and gets aid from a spider that can spell. A theatrical outing for Hanna-Barbera, creator of tv’s The Flintstones et al
Tim Burton’s remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a peculiarly lifeless confection that fails to find any of the zaniness of the original, something that one would have thought would have been Burton’s forte
Classic bad movie in which astronauts land on The Moon and encounter an all-female society. Some really datedly war of the sexes politics play out amid the laughably impoverished sets and effects
The remake of Cat People. In the hands of Paul Schrader, all the ambiguity is made overt and the film becomes one of Schrader’s allegories for tormented sexuality. On its own terms, this is an often smoulderingly sensual work
Val Lewton’s classic work of psychological ambiguity about a woman who believes she is turning into a panther. Lewton’s ingenuity was to leave the actuality of the monster one that was merely suggested
The fourth film version of the classic Old Dark House thriller, remade in the vein of the recent success of Murder on the Orient Express with an all-star cast of the day
The classic Bob Hope comedy version of the Old Dark House play. Probably overrated, this has a creaky affected atmosphere and laughs but fails to hold a candle to the far superior and more stylish silent version
The film that defined the Old Dark House genre with spooky thrills as people are stalked around a big mansion. Expatriate German director Paul Leni brings an extraordinarily sophisticated arsenal of visual tricks to bear
Another pointless 70s remake that replicates the 1976 Carrie almost scene for scene but misconstrues the material by a mile. Crucially, it comes without the sensational casting that made the original, nor a Brian De Palma at the helm
TV mini-series remake of the Stephen King novel, which restores many aspects of the book not in the 1976 film. Unfortunately, Brian De Palma has been replaced by a tv director who regards it as just another assignment
The very first Stephen King adaptation, a hit that made King’s name. Brian De Palma directs with flamboyant visuals that make you gasp but the film would be nothing without its amazing central performances from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie
Carnival of Souls was rediscovered as a cult classic in the 1980s. Then there was this remake that misses all of the haunted mood of the original in favour of makeup effects jumps and reality blurrings that make no sense
Classic film that has gained a cult reputation, this creates a superbly eerie and haunted atmosphere as a woman moves to a new town and finds herself surrounded by mysterious figures
Martin Scorsese remakes the classic thriller with Robert De Niro playing the ex-con seeking revenge against his lawyer. Scorsese makes the morality more ambiguous and bring out tensions within the family
Classic psycho-thriller with Robert Mitchum (who was never better) as an ex-con determined to take revenge against lawyer Gregory Peck. Stark and superbly sustained psychological suspense
A horror version of Frequency where Rachelle Lefevre has phone conversations across time with a disturbed woman who then starts causing people to disappear and altering the timeline. Cleverly told and with some chilling twists
A South Korean film that remakes The Caller about a girl who finds she can make phone calls across time to another woman only to find that the caller is a psychopath who begins to wreak havoc with her timeline
A remake of the silent German Expressionist classic that replicates the unique look and sets. Interesting, although it now emerges more like a film noir with artistic pretensions than the avant garde work the original was
Classic film that was groundbreaking for its designs – all distorted and angular sets, exaggerated shadows – that became defined as German Expressionism and its tale of a sinister hypnotist
A remake of Eli Roth’s first film? Why, given that the original only came out 14 years ago, is anybody’s guess. This literally recycles the original’s script but is deaf to its sarcastic humour of the original
The first film from Eli Roth, which proved a solid hit, one that gets back to gore-drenched horror basics. Not quite the classic it was acclaimed but delivers the goods and with a strong dose of wryly sarcastic humour
Roger Corman’s original A Bucket of Blood is a cult black comedy starring Dick Miller a nerdy wannabe who is acclaimed after passing dead bodies off as works of art. Here it was remade with Anthony Michael Hall inheriting the role of Walter Paisley
A quirky low-budget black comedy from cult B movie director Roger Corman with Dick Miller as a wannabe who suddenly receives artistic acclaim when he exhibits dead bodies in plaster as works of art
In the aftermath of Star Wars, the comic-book/serial hero was revived in this heavily Star Wars influenced remake that was released theatrically and then served as the pilot of a tv series
Abel Ferrara’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an overlooked film that settles in with an undeniable creepiness that is just as effective as the earlier versions. The metaphor for the pod people is more diffuse in this one but that does not mitigate the film’s effect