Yes, the recent herpes rash of pointless remakes that has plagued the American cineplex is a dispiriting development. Yes, the vast majority of these movies are mercenary attempts to cash in on the good will of a pre-existing "property." Still...hear me out on this....I think that there ARE movies that should be remade as soon as possible.
I recently watched the cult classic Roger Corman production Deathrace 2000, which, as advertised, is a sly, witty satire with giddy perverse bursts of violence. Unfortunately, it was made for approximately seventeen dollars, and it shows. Not only does the low budget reduce the impact of the action set pieces, it artificially limits the scope of the satire. At the start of the film, we get our only view of the futuristic dystopia of the year 2000: an insanely cheesy matte painting of Jetsons buildings. If somebody could get together fifteen or twenty million bucks for a remake that kept the central plot elements and expanded the film's universe, you'd be dealing with a real pisser. Plus, you could do real justice to the concept of tricked-out dune buggies intentionally running over the elderly.
Basically, the only time you should remake a movie is when the original version fucked up a great premise or screenplay through inept direction or a cripplingly low budget. Other candidates for potentially ass-kicking remakes:
George Romero's The Crazies
John Carpenter's They Live (of course, this will probably end up being the ONLY John Carpenter movie that DOESN'T get remade)
The shitty Jet Li movie The One and the shitty Jean Claude Van Damme movie Timecop for the same reason: both of these movies take a sci-fi premise with nearly unlimited possibilities, (parrallel universes and time travel, respectively) and completly wastes them. I mean, Timecop is about a cop who travels through time...and the vast majority of the film is spent in the amazingly foreign and exotic year of 1995!
Any other candidates for a jizz-blasting remake?
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On second thought... apparently "Deathrace" is already being remade...by uber-hack Paul W.S. Anderson, the shitstain behind such dreck as the Resident Evil series and Alien V. Predator (how do you manage to fuck up aliens fighting Predators?) This will probably suck, because the one downfall of increasing the budget of these promising film premises is that the premises get watered down to make them more marketable so that they can make back their larger budget. So, the new Deathrace features no elderly people getting splattered by dune buggies with machine guns on their bumpers, but more "cool" features like tunnels and rockets and obstacles on the track. So, instead of a commentary on the cheaping of human life in a post-industrial media saturated environment, we get shit from Mario Cart.
I always wanted a Mario Kart movie. Next up: Tetris. It stars Keanu Reeves, who also wrote the screenplay. The one good thing is that Mark Mothersbaugh is doing the soundtrack.
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