Shot by shot: Hollywood’s wildest and weirdest remakes

"The Wicker Man" is a remake of a Scottish horror classic of the same name, set in America and starring Nicolas Cage as a cop who investigates a bee-obsessed neo-pagan cult on a remote island. It's an extremely strange and funny film, though it's clear that much of the comedy is unintentional. Cage dials his performance up all the way to 11, especially when he's running around in a bear suit, screaming and punching people. This film, or perhaps its cult following thanks to clips on the then-brand-new YouTube, began Cage's glorious transition from respectable, Oscar-bait actor into a guy who did exclusively crazy, over-the-top performances in terrible films, which continued the next year with "Ghost Rider" and "Next."

Werner Herzog claims that he'd never seen Abel Ferrara's original "Bad Lieutenant," a gritty story of a corrupt police lieutenant in New York, played by Harvey Keitel. But he also claims he wasn't intending to make "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" (what a clunky title!) a comedy, and it's hard to imagine how he thought Nicolas Cage's drug-induced hallucinations of singing iguanas would play with audiences. It's peak Cage, as he once again holds nothing back in an emotional, erratic and totally unrestrained performance in a film that makes almost no sense and has nothing to do with the original, aside from the unhinged lead performances and the badness of their respective lieutenants.

The 2014 remake of "Annie" was produced by Jay-Z and Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith and starred recent Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis as the titular orphan. Besides making Annie African-American, the remake included some strange changes: Annie's no longer looking for her new parents, the Daddy Warbucks character is a germophobic cell phone billionaire named Benjamin Stacks, and Annie doesn't know how to read or write. There's a truly illogical fake-kidnapping plot, and Cameron Diaz's performance as Miss Hannigan was so badly received that she retired from acting afterward.

"Death Race" is a remake of 1975's "Death Race 2000" that came out in 2008, which is already a bad omen. The director was Paul W.S. Anderson, known for his work turning video games into feature films and for not being Paul Thomas Anderson nor Wes Anderson. The remake stars Jason Statham and a slumming Joan Allen and replaces the transcontinental race of the original with a reality show-style gladiator game taking place inside a prison, while leaving out all of the original's black humor. Nonetheless, there have been three direct-to-video sequels, which is probably where the first one should have been released as well.

In 1998, Gus Van Sant had his greatest commercial success with "Good Will Hunting," a movie that pulled off the seemingly impossible task of getting Ben Affleck an Oscar for writing. He used his newfound clout to make a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," and he chose Vince Vaughn as his new Norman Bates. It's almost a duplicate of the original, albeit in color, although Van Sant bizarrely decides to have Bates pleasure himself while spying on victim Anne Heche. He also adds surreal shots of random things — thunderstorms, a deer — during the murder scenes. Why did he do this? It's unclear — just as it's unclear why he made this movie in the first place.

The 2013 update of Brian De Palma's horror classic "Carrie" essentially sticks to the original's plot and characters, but things are decidedly uglier. Carrie's tormenter, Chris, isn't just a mean girl bully; she's willing to jump over a fence and slit a pig's throat. Carrie's mother isn't just a crazy religious zealot; she's a self-harmer, which the film shows in unflinching detail. And while Sissy Spacek's Carrie takes telekinetic revenge on her schoolmates in what feels like an uncontrolled burst of anger, Chloe Grace Moretz's Carrie is specific in her revenge. Spacek flips Chris' car with her mind when it's heading to run her down, while Moretz locks Chris inside and sends the car into a gas station to explode. It's not any scarier, but it's a whole lot meaner. Also, it doesn't help that Moretz's Carrie looks less like an outcast than a girl who's a smile and a shower away from looking like a legitimate prom queen.

On the surface, Tony Scott's remake of "The Taking of Pelham 123" (the original spells out the numbers in the title, but who has time for that in 2009?) is the same as the 1974 version. A team of hijackers stops a subway train, takes one car hostage and makes a ransom demand. But while the original's Robert Shaw is a cool, calculating mastermind, John Travolta's character in the remake is a volatile, neck-tattooed investment banker-turned-hijacker. The character doesn't make any sense, nor does the criminal plot, which involves manipulating financial markets but not a way to escape from the subway. The original is tense and, well, original, while the remake ends up as a generic action movie, complete with a chase and gunfight, even though Denzel Washington isn't a cop. He's just an MTA employee having a bad, bad day. And realistically in modern-day New York, the plot would be foiled when the train went out of service due to the MTA's failing infrastructure. 

Russell Brand tries to step into Dudley Moore's tiny shoes in the remake of "Arthur" and fails to pull it off. As the titular alcoholic billionaire, Brand lacks the underdog charisma of Moore, while he and Helen Mirren struggle to match the chemistry of Moore with John Gielgud. But more than anything, the era is simply wrong. Three years after the financial markets crashed, no one is sympathetic to a billionaire drunk simply because he might not get to marry his manic pixie dream girl, Greta Gerwig. And while it's responsible that Arthur gets sober in the remake, it's not nearly as fun to watch Brand at AA meetings as it is to watch Moore chugging whiskey in a fancy car.

"Guess Who" is a modern, race-reversed update on "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" that replaces Oscar-winning actor Sidney Poitier with Teen Choice Award-winning actor Ashton Kutcher. Interracial relationships weren't as big a deal in 2005 as in 1967, so the remake is much more of a comedy, but not a particularly smart one: Kutcher tells racist jokes in front of the family, everyone feels awkward when "Ebony and Ivory" comes on the radio, and his girlfriend's father, Bernie Mac, makes Kutcher sleep in a bed with him to make sure he doesn't sleep with his daughter, apparently? And there are a lot of jokes about ribs. It's less a story of an African-American father objecting to his daughter marrying a white guy than it is a movie about a father objecting to his daughter marrying a spastic idiot.

"Rumor Has It" is a remake/sequel that asks the question: "What if Jennifer Aniston's mother and grandmother were the real-life inspiration for 'The Graduate'?" She goes off in search of Kevin Costner, thinking he's her biological father, and then ends up hooking up with him — which means he slept with three generations of women in her family. The whole thing is more icky than fun or romantic, contains none of the spirit of "The Graduate," and the movie probably wasn't helped by firing the original director in favor of Rob Reiner halfway through production. Let's hope there's no sequel featuring an elderly Costner's romance with Aniston's daughter.

The third remake of the 1956 sci-fi film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was 2007's "The Invasion," starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. All of the films involve aliens that take over humans, creating duplicates that have the same memories but are inherently different. The original had the aliens using pods; this one has the invasion spreading via vomit — and through REM sleep, as if this was a "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie. There are antibodies spread by crop dusters, disorienting hand-held camera shots, aliens, a million car chases and not surprisingly, multiple screenwriters and directors. It's all a metaphor for...something, but it's not clear the filmmakers ever decided what that was.

The original Charlton Heston version of "Ben-Hur" won a record 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and its chariot race is one of he most famous sequences in movie history. The 2016 remake lost roughly $100 million, and as far as we can tell its only awards were for "Remake or Sequel That Shouldn’t Have Been Made." The new version is an hour-and-a-half shorter than the original but greatly increases the role of Jesus Christ, probably trying to replicate the recent success of "Noah" with Christian audiences. Given the compressed storytelling, that meant that scenes of violent, bloody battles are jarringly intercut with scenes of Jesus and his disciples. But mainly, the film suffers because it doesn't have a movie star — Jack Huston is a fine character actor, but he doesn't have the larger-than-life presence to carry an epic like Heston did. And the less said about Morgan Freeman and his biblical dreadlock wig, the better. Pretty sweet chariot race, though!

The 2011 remake of "Footloose" retains the plot of the 1984 original, about a town that bans dancing, though it relocates the story to Georgia. However, it doesn't particularly update the screenplay, which means that there's a town of modern teenagers obsessed with rock n' roll, and their parents, who were born in the '60s, somehow hate rock music. You'd think they'd ban rap music instead! Nonetheless, the main problem with the remake is the lack of a Kevin Bacon. The remake's lead is professional dancer Kenny Wormald, whose acting is as shaky as his Boston accent. There's never going to be a Six Degrees of Kenny Wormald game.

"Father's Day" is a remake of the French film, "Les Compères," which was a big hit for Gerard Depardieu in 1983. The newer one stars Billy Crystal and Robin Williams as two ex-boyfriends of the same woman, searching to find her runaway son. The flimsy excuse for them to go on a road trip together? The guy they're looking for has a girlfriend who is following Sugar Ray on tour, and even in 1997 it wasn't plausible that someone wanted to see Sugar Ray in concert more than once. There's some truly awful comedy, including coffee poured onto testicles and Crystal headbutting drug dealers as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones played. As a bonus, this movie also features Julia Louis-Dreyfus in her worst on-screen role, including this scene where Crystal doesn't understand how a telephone works.

In 1997, Robin Williams starred in a remake of "The Absent-Minded Professor" called "Flubber." His character is still a professor who invents a substance called Flubber that's incredibly bouncy. In the original, that is used to make cars fly and basketball players jump high in a crucial game. In the remake, we've got cars and basketball but also an unsettling subplot where Williams' sexy-voiced robot assistant, Weebo, falls in love with him. She creates a human hologram, Flubber is a sentient creature that does song-and-dance numbers, and it's all pretty slow. Does the invention of Flubber save the professor's struggling university? Yes. But given that the professor had already invented a better version of Alexa and Siri 20 years early, he really didn't need the bouncy stuff at all.

The '90s were an incredible decade for disastrous American remakes of French comedies. "Jungle 2 Jungle" remakes a French film known as "Little Indian, Big City," about a man who learns he has a son who's been raised in a South American indigenous tribe. Gene Siskel called the original the worst film of 1994, and Roger Ebert wrote, "If you, under any circumstances, see 'Little Indian, Big City,' I will never let you read one of my reviews again." So naturally Disney remade it with Tim Allen and Martin Short. The remake is no better — it's just set in America, keeping the Russian mobsters and the fish-out-of-water cultural differences that came off as racist in 1997 too. Thankfully, there was no "Jungle 3 Jungle" sequel.

Eli Roth produced this remake of 2002's "Cabin Fever," which is essentially a rehash of the original that adds very little to the first one. If a shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho," one of the most significant films of all time, was pointless, imagine how pointless an almost shot-by-shot remake of "Cabin Fever" is. The original was derivative enough, so making it slightly more violent is hardly an excuse for redoing a film that was only 14 years old. It may be the least essential film ever made.

"Love Affair" is a remake of both "Love Affair" and "An Affair to Remember" but curiously came out just one year after it got an extended homage in "Sleepless in Seattle," which openly discussed the film and copied its device of having people meet atop the Empire State Building. The remake, starring real-life couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, is pleasant enough for the first half, but in the second half, a car accident puts Bening in a wheelchair, and she ghosts Beatty when they're supposed to meet at the Empire State Building. In 1934, it makes sense that you'd have to make an elaborate plan to rendezvous with someone you met on a boat, but it feels less realistic that in the '90s Bening wouldn't simply leave Beatty's famous ex-football star a message on his answering machine, saying, "Sorry I missed our meeting. I got hit by a car." And would that misunderstanding really last for months? Surely at least one them saw "Sleepless in Seattle."

Yet another remake of a French farce, "Oscar" teams up legendary comedy director John Landis with legendary non-comedian Sylvester Stallone, who plays a gangster trying to go straight. As if it weren't enough to ask Stallone to anchor a complicated comedy, adapted from a French film, it's also a Depression-era period piece, increasing the degree of difficulty and the badness of the film. (John Landis' original choice was Al Pacino.) As a result, in the same year she won an Oscar for "My Cousin Vinny," Marisa Tomei was also nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the Golden Raspberry Awards.

The remake of "Rollerball" had a lot of problems. The first sign of trouble was casting Chris Klein in the James Caan role from the original 1975 film. That movie was set in the dystopian, violent world of 2018, 43 years beyond the present day, while the 2002 remake was set in...2005. The remake also abandons much of the political commentary of the original in favor of skate stunts, while one long scene is in night vision. There's no plot reason; the director just screwed up the shot. The film is also notable for landing director John McTiernan in prison, after he hired Anthony Pellicano to wiretap the film’s producer. 

Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" feels lost to time, after the success of the recent "Planet of the Apes" trilogy, that goes in a very different direction from the original's astronaut plot. The film abandons the original's shocking Statue of Liberty ending for a convoluted plot about time travel. No one seems to be enjoying himself except Paul Giamatti, and the movie never became the franchise the studio hoped. In fact, two actors blew their chances at other franchises: Mark Wahlberg left "Ocean's 11" to do "Apes" (replaced by Matt Damon), and Tim Roth chose to play the villainous ape General Thade instead of Severus Snape in the EIGHT "Harry Potter" films. His loss was Alan Rickman's gain. 

The remake of "Red Dawn" is about a group of high schoolers who lead an armed resistance when America is invaded by...North Korea? Yes, the Russian villains from the original have been replaced by a fearsome (but apparently incompetent) invading force of North Koreans. How does that makes any sense? Because the original version had China as the enemy, and the studio did reshoots and a lot of CGI once it realized it needed a different villain if the film wanted to play in the giant Chinese market. The original was the first movie to get a PG-13 rating, and this film has one too, which means it's oddly bloodless and deathless for a movie that's mostly made up of machine gun battles.

"The Vanishing" is a remake of the Dutch psychological thriller of the same name, released two years earlier. Though the 1993 version has roughly the same plot: A man's girlfriend disappears with no explanation, and he becomes obsessed with finding out what happens. Eventually he meets the sociopathic man who did it. It's a chilling tale, but the American version softens all of the original's rough edges, introducing the villain far earlier and adding a happy ending that renders the whole movie meaningless. Weirdly, the man who butchered the remake is George Sluizer, the same director who did the original. 

Judy Holliday won a Best Actress Oscar for her role as a showgirl whose ditzy demeanor masks deep intelligence and cleverness. Melanie Griffith was cast in the charmless remake, which loses all the snappy dialogue of the original and adds domestic violence, seemingly because she's also a blonde with a high voice. No one in the remake has any chemistry or seems to particularly like each other...not even Griffith and her real-life husband, Don Johnson, playing the reporter she falls in love with. In fact, they'd get divorced within a year of making this film, and one can't help but think the movie contributed to their breakup.

ABC's remake of the Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey hit had one fundamental problem: There wasn't any dirty dancing in it. Star Abigail Breslin isn't a dancer and didn't get too good, so the montage of Baby learning to dance with her partner, Johnny, mainly involves other characters pretending that she's improving. There is also an added framing device where Baby is attending a musical called "Dirty Dancing," based on a book she wrote about her life, and choreographed by Johnny. The ostensible feature film sequel from 2004, "Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights," is less a sequel than a remake set during the Cuban Revolution instead of the Catskills. It's not very good, and the cultural content ranges from bland to outright offensive, but at least the actors can dance!