101 B-Movies that Would Make A Good Remake

Oh, man... it would be heaven to be able to clean up some hideous mistakes of film art :)

1. Batman and Robin. Well, subtracting Shumacher from the equation could only improve things but then this is almost a roadmap of how to make a bad movie. It needs more.

To fix:
A. Concentrate on one villain. Every Batman movie after the first one taught us this. Batman has the best stable of potential villains of anyone in comics, with the possible exception of The Flash. There's more than enough to go around. Either Bane or Poison Ivy or Mr. Freeze is more than good enough to carry a movie by themselves. Just based on the second animated movie, I have a preference for Mr. Freeze, but Poison Ivy would be a great choice as well.

B. Keep Robin in the suit from his first appearance; red and green works perfectly well. There should be some tension between them here, but not as much as in the comics; the age difference is much smaller.

C. Ditch Batgirl. Ditch the Alfred plot and simply replace the actor, preferably with someone that looks about 50 some-odd. In fact, replace everyone. Both leads should be unknowns or almost-knowns. Or, if possible and you must use knows, get someone without an ego that can submerge himself into the role. I don't want to see Clooney and O'Donnel. I want to see Batman and Robin.

D. Ditch most of the sad attempts at humor. Or at least have them appear in some context within the film.

2. Alien 3

Ripley, Newt and Hicks are picked up a few months after the LV426 disaster by a giant Company colonizing starship headed for a new world. A robot probe has beamed back info that reveals excellent potential for a colony.

Rumors of war on Earth are circulating. A message capsule from Earth tells the ship captain to watch for possible terrorist activity.

Meanwhile, Hicks and Ripley get used to their new surroundings. Newt is still somewhat traumatized; the ship's doctor begins care for her. The ship is enourmous, with tens of thousands of people in sleep-pods, and with vast stores of machinery, food, parts, tools, etc; everything needed to establish a colony. Most of the crew are androids, though not nearly as intelligent as the ones we've seen so far.

Hicks and Ripley begin to get closer, continuing the romance subplot from the second movie. They contenplate staying with the colony and starting a new life.

The ship enters orbit, and two ships are sent down to scout out landing sites and possible locations for later colonization; emptying the ship and setting up a real colony will take several months to a couple years. Ripley and Hicks have become good friends with the doctor due to the connection with Newt, and so are invited to come see the first landings with the rest of the higher-ups.

The first survey ship relays pictures from the surface. To the survivors' horror, the lifeforms shown are all very 'Alien'-like. She tries to warn the doctor, but the captain becomes instantly suspicious. He thinks they are separatists who want to disrupt the colony mission, and he knows that the doctor is the only one on the ship that could override him. He orders Ripley and Hicks taken into custody and put in cryosleep until there is time to deal with them.

The robot survey ship collects a few of the most interesting-looking lifeforms and starts back. They are brought aboard and locked down in a secure area while tests are run. One manages to get free, then kills two of the others: their acid blood eats a hole in the secure facility, enabling the one creature to escape into the ship.

The second ship starts back, but the captain orders it destroyed. A remote self-destruct signal is sent and the ship blows up.

Meanwhile, in the chaos, Newt manages to free Ripley and Hicks. She speaks her first words. "It's coming for us."

Ripley manages to convince the captain that she's not insane, and the hunt begins. Conversation with the doctor reveals what happened on the surface; Ripley theorizes that this is what an Alien infestation does: take over an entire ecosystem. "Breed and spread, that's all they seem to know. Breed and spread," the doctor says to her.

Major bughunt occurs. Big fight pccurs early on that wipes out most of the andriod crewmembers and severely damages the main computer. Ripley, Hicks, Newt, the doctor, the captain and a couple Security types are all that's left: the malfunction prevents them from waking the rest of the people safely. They try anyway, and the group they awaken die horribly. Days pass as they hunt and run. "What's it doing?" Ripley says. "It should be coming for us."

Finally they trap the beast and kill it, but the fight damages the engineering section to such a degree that the ship is unlivable. Automatic systems take over and begin to evacuate the colonists by rotating out each large section; those sections are designed to survive a space accident and become lifeboats themselves. They disperse in a wide pattern on the assumpion that eventually they'll drift into a shipping lane or contact a habitable planet.

Ripley and the others run and make sure they get in a section before it detatches. There, they make a horrible discovery. The alien has been distracting them all this time, and has been implanting eggs into each of the thousands of sleeping colonists. They'll be able to ditch the infected colonists here and enter hypersleep, but the others will eventually be picked up and start the horror over again.

"Breed and spread," Ripley says as she watches helplessly as the pods all disperse out into the universe. "Breed and spread..."
 

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WayneLigon said:

2. Alien 3

Have you thought about this one very much, WayneLigon? :D

Other movies that could be re-made better:

The Avengers (looked so bad I didn't even see it)
The Wild Wild West (ditto)

and dare I even suggest it

Fantastic Voyage (the original has a low budget kind of charm; maybe it wouldn't work today)

I seem to be fixated on 1960s tv series (since Avengers & Wild Wild West were tv series in the 1960s):

Land of the Giants

ok, back to the actual topic, movie remakes that would be better:

Howard the Duck (complete overhaul needed starting with the script)

The Punisher (just got into the graphic novels recently, and was horrified to learn it had already been a movie with Dolph Lundgren)

Any movie with Dolph Lundgren, even though he wasn't the worst actor in Masters of the Universe.

Any movie with Dolph's former lover Grace Jones, but especially Conan the Destroyer.
 

Barendd Nobeard said:
Have you thought about this one very much, WayneLigon? :D


You could say that :) There are five or six ways I've thought to re-write various films I detested, and some that were soooo close. A bad movie you can kind of accept on it's own. It's the near-misses that really get to me. The film that you can watch and think 'you know, with a couple pages worth of script, we could have had a truly great movie'.
 

Sixchan said:
The day the world Somethinged.

Can't remember what the Somethinged was (it might have been "The Day the Earth Warmed Up"), but I thought it was an OK film. Basically, at the exact same time, on the exact same longitude, the USA and the USSR test their most powerful nuclear weapons yet. The result is that the Earth begins to spiral into the sun. Dun dun dun...

I think you might be confusing this film with The Day The Earth Stood Still, in which what you describe doesn't happen, as far as I know.
 

CCamfield said:
I think you might be confusing this film with The Day The Earth Stood Still, in which what you describe doesn't happen, as far as I know.

I thought that too, but it seems I can dimly remember something else with a similar title. Looked on IMDB and didn't find anything that jarred my memory though.

DId find this, though.

Sampo (1959)...aka Day the Earth Froze, The (1964)
----
Based on Norse/Scandanavian mythology, this movie traces the exploits of Lemminkainen as he woos the fair Anniky and battles the evil witch Loukhy. Loukhy kidnaps Anniky to compel her father to build for her a Sampo, a magical device that creates salt, grain, and gold. When Lemminkainen tries (and fails) to recover the Sampo, Loukhy steals the sun, plunging the world into frozen darkness.
-----
Now that sounds kinda cool. I don't suppose anyone has seen this?
-----

AHA! Found it. 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire' (1961).
 

"War-Gods of the Deep", 1965, starring Vincent Price.

I recently got this one on DVD and immediately thought to myself "Vincent Price is the master, as always, the plot needed serious help, but what a great idea for a module!"

It was based on Poe's "City in the Sea", so the theme fit my undersea campaign perfectly.
 

Chauzu said:
4) Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

I always thought AotKT would have made a better midnight movie than "Rocky Horror". After all, it gave us such great lines as:

"Giant Tomatoes mean bigger pizzas!"

"I, Jesus Christ, for Technitron."

"And you....wanted an arm?"

"This, may God help us, is a cherry tomato!"

"He means nip."

"If you're feeling sad and blue, tomatoes end it all for you!"

"Then they captured a cannery and bottled my mother."

"All right you guys, they've gone now."
 
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I love those old movie titles, they just so easily get me excited. But from I understand, most 'normal' people don't (must be a geek thing).

Anyhoo, there's a question of course what exactly is a B-movie. I see a lot of movies here that have been mentioned, which I don't really consider B-movies, simply bad A-movies.

That said, I saw once a sci-fi b-movie which centered around an alien tough arse from some desert post-apolyptic planet, which when following some criminal from same planet ends up on earth. The catch? They are really, really tiny.
 


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