Added: 843 days ago by Stephen Daultrey | Posted in: Celebs | 10 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/21225/NO-HOLLYWOOD-YOUVE-GOT-IT-ALL-WRONG/'>NO HOLLYWOOD, YOU'VE GOT IT ALL WRONG!</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

Planet of the Apes, The Haunting, The Wicker Man, Get Carter, House of Wax, Rollerball, The Grudge.spot the connection?

All cherished cult films, blessed with individuality and artistic flair, and representative of the time they were made - and all turned into moronic Hollywood turd-heaps, which bombed at the box office anyway, making them even more pointless than Simon Cowell's hairstylist.

I don't get it.

Two weeks ago, I was watching the Karate Kid trailer, a remake that transfers the action to China and therefore doesn't even feature karate as its main form of combat, making it to the biggest WTF movie venture of the summer. And going forward, Dario Argento's arthouse chiller Suspiria - one of my favourite films ever - is poised for some predictably hideous Hollywood dumbing treatment, while, bizarrely Steven Spielberg is reshooting Korean thriller Old Boy with (apparently) Will Smith in the main role, which is actually, so, so wrong, it may just work.

But why is Hollywood remaking these great films, anyway? Why doesn't it just remake shit films instead, as long as there's enough potential in the original premise to ooze out some quality? Most of the audiences these are made for haven't even heard of most of the originals anyway, and hey, a plot's a plot. At least the pressure's off, and there's no great source material to tarnish.

Or better still, why not screw Hollywood altogether, and give a bunch of turkeys to the 'rest of the world' and show the big-buck studios how it's done. In fact, I'd happily see these ten Hollywood films get the remake treatment. Especially Howard The Duck.

TEN HOLLYWOOD TURKEYS WITH 'REMAKE' POTENTIAL

MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
I know this film has only just come out, but if ever there was a case of get your butts back to the drawing board and start all over again, it sure as hell was this.
The whole premise of hippified soldiers being trained in the art of telekinesis and Uri Geller-style spoonbending, all apparently based on real fact, was enough to give most cinema-goers a 'see it now' boner. Unfortunately, this film's hilarious 'high point' was a soldier running into a wall. Laugh? I nearly slipped into a coma, and that was 12-seconds into the film. A complete waste of acting talent (Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges), this HAS to be remade almost as much as I need to order an Indian takeaway with a bottle of ice-cold Tiger beer tonight, because frankly I'm starving.

JUDGE DREDD
One of comic-book's meanest ever characters was transformed into a predictable, sappy plate of Hollywood toenail clippings, with Sly Stallone blasphemously removing the infamous Dredd helmet, and getting embroiled in a dopey plot engineered by a four-and-a-half-year-old kid while playing with his Action Man figures and doing all those 'pow, pow' noises. Considering the moody storylines and totalitarian horror of its comic-book inspiration, the Dredd franchise cannot be left to lie and rot like this.

EXORCIST II
One of the worst sequels ever, set almost entirely in a mental asylum with an acorn of a plot, but further undermined by laughable special effects akin to a Punch and Judy show. Remake it now, make it really chilling and really scary, and don't just rely on the voice of Darth Vader to give it some atmos. What a load of sweaty, stinky bollocks.

TWINS
Solely because all these photos of 'the world's tallest man standing next to the world's shortest man' need some sort of extra purpose than to just randomly appear in tabloid newspapers whenever their editors need to fill some space. A foreign-language remake of Twins, directed by legend horror oddball Tod Browning (after necromancers have resurrected his body) seems to be the ultimate way of converting Twins into a legend of cult cinema.

THE BODYGUARD
So maybe I'm being selfish here, but I'm proposing a remake of this dreary rom-thriller with the ginger one from Girls Aloud in the Whitney Houston role (or possibly Billie Piper or Jessica Alba), using Madonna's 'Erotic' as the 'And I Will Always Love You' song, and spicing it up with a with some ambiguously pornographic 'are they real?' sex scenes, preferably directed by Lars Von Trier, who loves that sort of thing, and me (see what I did here?) as the Kevin Costner bodyguard.

CLICK
What a waste of one of cinema's greatest farting scenes, when Adam Sandler uses his magical remote control to 'pause' his boss David Hasslehoff, and unleash gaseous venom into the abyss of his welcoming mouth. "Did you put shit in my sandwich?" the Hoff screams at his secretary after Sandler 'unpauses' him and innocently takes up a position the other side of the room. Unfortunately, the rest of this comedy was rubbish. This is crying out for a new production just so more can be made of that rippling bottom burp.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN
A cult of maniacal kiddies torturing and sacrificing adults in the haunting quiet of an American countryside, while a soft summertime breeze gently ripples through the seasonal harvest? This had all the potential ingredients of being a truly terrifying tale of biblical connotations, but was bottom-raped by a load of camp child acting, B-movie direction and a script airlifted straight from the Planet Cheese. What this needs is a sheen of Wicker Man-style weirdness, a spooky Christopher Lee soundtrack (yes, this man sings) and to be promptly lumped into a tranquil Olde English farmyard setting, complete with suspiciously possessed pigs. A Blighty reproduction could result in an instant genre classic. Do it now, people, do it now.

HOWARD THE DUCK
A live-action movie about a heroic, cigar-chomping duck. How on earth did its original creators manage to fuck this one up? It was there on a plate. In today's age of CGI advancement, this is primed for a high-brow re-telling, preferably with Guillermo del Toro direction to make it all dark and Pans Labyrinth-y, and to cart it off to civil war-era Spain for added emotional depth. Better than a giant-sized bowl of Paella!

GRUMPY OLD MEN
Walther Matthau is one of my favourite ever actors, so the fact that this comedy of two bickering pensioners was about as funny as a Medieval beheading on an Ecstasy comedown, came as one of the 20th century's greatest disappointments. If Albert Steptoe and Alf Garnett were still alive, I'd be envisaging a gritty East London makeover, with a script that's 87% "you faaaaccck'n caaaahhhhhnnnt", 12% manbag slapfests and 1% mulling over West Ham United's forward line.

TITANIC
Take out the romantic plot and all the pomposity, and hey, presto - a complete shipwreck of a movie. Literally.

Added: 843 days ago by Stephen Daultrey | Posted in: Celebs | 10 Comments

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