10 Worst Remakes of Beloved '80s Movies

And the ’80s especially needed electricity. Those movies lived on movie-star confidence, giant emotional gestures, shameless sentiment, odd tonal sincerity, and that half-embarrassing, half-beautiful belief that a premise could actually become a whole emotional universe. The remakes below keep sanding that down. They get tidier where they should get messier. They get safer where they should get stranger. They get louder where they should get more alive.

10 'Arthur' (2011)

The original Arthur knew that drunkenness, childishness, grief, wealth, and loneliness can all sit inside the same human being at once. Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) there was not just doing cute rich-man misbehavior. He felt spiritually stunted, charming in a self-destructive way, and faintly tragic because the movie understands that limitless money can preserve immaturity the way formaldehyde preserves tissue. You laugh at Arthur, though the movie also knows he is one emotional collapse away from being unbearable.

The remake turns him into something much softer and much less dangerous. Arthur Bach (Russell Brand) is still immature, still erratic, still drifting through inherited luxury, though the writing keeps protecting him from the bitterness and sadness that made the original character worth watching. That is the recurring failure here: the film wants the eccentricity without the rot. Helen Hobson (Helen Mirren) does fine work as Hobson, but even that relationship lands differently because the whole movie is gentler than it should be. Arthur should feel like a spoiled man’s last possible chance to become emotionally real. This one mostly feels like whimsical rehab by rom-com.

9 'Fame' (2009)

A movie like Fame only works if ambition feels dangerous. Not merely inspiring. The original is rough-edged and sprawling and not always neat, though it understands what performance schools actually do to young people. They inflate dreams, sharpen talent, feed ego, expose mediocrity, create obsession, sexual confusion, class anxiety, artistic self-invention, humiliation. The kids want to be seen so badly it starts eating through the rest of their personalities. That tension is the whole movie.

The remake wants uplift much more than hunger. That is fatal. It smooths the atmosphere into generic arts-school aspiration and starts playing like a talent-show movie with higher production values. Everyone is striving, yes, but striving in the wrong register. Too presentable. Too cleanly arranged. Fame should be sweaty with insecurity. It should feel like every hallway contains one person close to breakthrough and another close to psychic collapse. Here, the school becomes a content-delivery machine for nice-looking numbers and familiar emotional beats. It has movement. It does not have desperation.

8 'Overboard' (2018)

This is one of those remakes where you can see the logic and still feel the blood draining out of the room. Yes, the original premise is morally bizarre. Yes, changing the gender setup sounds like a sensible update. But a premise as warped as Overboard’s only works when the movie understands how unstable its own fantasy really is. It needs prickliness. It needs resentment and attraction and class humiliation all grinding against each other at once. You need to feel the bad idea under the comedy.

The remake gets nicer and dies from that niceness. And that’s tragic. Kate Sullivan (Anna Faris) has a pleasant frazzled energy, and Leonardo Montenegro (Eugenio Derbez) brings enough vanity to suggest a sharper movie somewhere nearby, but the script keeps rushing to soften the edges before they can spark. The result is less offensive than the original in some obvious ways and far less memorable in every other way. It is the kind of remake that mistakes moral cleanup for dramatic improvement. All it really does is remove the voltage. A weird romantic premise without danger just becomes paperwork with flirtation.

The problem with remaking Footloose is that people keep thinking it was about dancing as an abstract symbol of youthful freedom. But it was not that vague. It was about a town choking on grief and control. Ren arriving there matters because he is a live wire entering a culture that has turned mourning into policy. The dancing, the music, the rebellion, all of that works because the adults are spiritually rigid enough to make joy feel subversive. That emotional arrangement is what gives the movie lift.

The remake understands the setup and somehow keeps missing the fever. Ren McCormack (Kenny Wormald) is fine on a functional level, but the movie rarely catches that wonderful old feeling of a teenager pushing back against a social order that is both ridiculous and genuinely oppressive. It is competent. That is the problem. Footloose should not just be competent. It should feel overheated, impulsive, a little corny in a way that becomes emotionally persuasive through sheer conviction. This version is too aware of itself, too measured, too polished to really kick free of its own update strategy.

6 'The Hitcher' (2007)

The original The Hitcher is one of those road nightmares that feels like it has stepped out of ordinary narrative reality and onto a mythic shoulder of the highway. John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) does not just threaten Jim Halsey. He invades his moral space. He turns the open road into a corridor where logic starts breaking down and evil begins behaving less like a criminal motive and more like a cosmic taunt. That is why the movie sticks. It is not merely violent. It is metaphysically rude.

The remake turns that into a more conventional pursuit film. John Ryder (Sean Bean) has menace, sure, but the writing does not let Ryder become sufficiently uncanny. He is dangerous in a recognizable, movie-villain way. The original needed him to feel wrong in a less containable sense. And once that is lost, the whole film starts shrinking. Even adding Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) into the core movement does not help much, because the story keeps steering toward slicker danger instead of deeper spiritual unease. The Hitcher should make the road feel morally empty and personally cursed. This one just chases.

5 'Conan the Barbarian' (2011)

Conan should feel older than civilization and younger than thought. That is the ideal. It should feel like somebody found a bloodstained legend carved into a ruined wall and filmed the memory of reading it. The 1982 movie gets there through score, silence, stone-faced grandeur, barbaric mood, and the strange gift Arnold Schwarzenegger had for seeming less like an actor than a piece of myth dragged into motion.

The remake is busier, louder, more visibly active, and much less mythic. Jason Momoa had enough raw presence to make this work in theory. He can snarl, move, and dominate a frame. But the writing keeps feeding Conan (Jason Momoa) ordinary revenge-fantasy fuel instead of true sword-and-sorcery atmosphere. He should feel shaped by a brutal world that has gods, rituals, cruelty, lust, and old iron in the ground. Instead he often feels like a modern action protagonist sprinting through a genre skin. That is what this movie never understands: sword-and-sorcery is not just action with axes. It needs ritual heat. It needs pagan weather. This version has props.

4 'Red Dawn' (2012)

The original is ridiculous, absolutely, but it is ridiculous in a hot-blooded way that still gives it life. It understands teenage war fantasy with a disturbing amount of clarity. Kids become guerrillas. American landscape becomes invasion map. Brotherhood, panic, patriotism, fear, and adolescent identity all fuse inside one giant Cold War adrenaline dream. You do not watch it for realism. Well, not necessarily. You watch it because it turns youth into desperate mythology.

The Red Dawn remake, though, feels like it was built after too many meetings. The Wolverines are there. The occupation is there. The resistance beats are there. The whole thing is structurally present and emotionally half-asleep. Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) should feel like the kind of older-brother-warrior figure teenagers would mythologize instantly under pressure. Instead the movie keeps flattening its own rebellion fantasy into bland modern combat drama. The old one ran on fever and fear. This one runs on tactical usefulness. That is a horrible trade for a movie that needed to feel like kids were trying to write themselves into national legend before terror could catch up.

3 'RoboCop' (2014)

This is one of those remakes where the craftsmanship almost tricks people into being forgiving. It is handsomely mounted. It is not stupid in the obvious way. It has ideas it can articulate. But the original RoboCop is not beloved because it is a cleanly mounted idea machine. It is beloved because it is savage. It is corporate satire soaked in body horror and media poison. It is funny, sick, sad, and furious all at once. Murphy becomes a product, and the film knows exactly how obscene that is.

The remake shifts the center of gravity in a subtler but still fatal way. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) becomes more emotionally continuous with his family, more self-aware, more conventionally dramatic as a suffering husband and father. That sounds richer until you realize the movie is quietly shrinking the larger social nightmare to make room for cleaner personal feeling. OmniCorp still exists, yes, though it never feels as spiritually monstrous as OCP. And RoboCop needs monstrous systems. It is not just a man-machine tragedy. It is a world where markets, media, policing, and death all got into bed together and had a chrome child. Once that ugliness gets tidied up, the whole thing becomes respectable in the worst sense.

2 'Poltergeist' (2015)

A haunted-house movie fails the second it stops understanding the sanctity of ordinary family space. That is the whole pressure point. Poltergeist works because the suburban home starts as recognizable warmth, television hum, toys, bedtime, siblings, mild parental chaos, the soft clutter of being alive together. Then that warmth gets rewritten into something spiritually invasive. The horror lands because comfort was there first.

The remake rushes the contamination. That is its biggest sin. The family never becomes fully lived-in before the movie starts reaching for effect beats and lore mechanisms. Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) and Amy Bowen (Rosemarie DeWitt) try to create enough household looseness to give the supernatural something to violate, but the script keeps moving too fast and too mechanically. A house like this should feel as if it is learning the family, studying the weak corners, finding out where love lives so it can strike there. This one mostly behaves like a haunted-house attraction that knows when to trigger itself. It is not enough to have closets and clowns and flickering dimensions. The house must feel hateful. This one feels programmed.

1 'The Fog' (2005)

This is the worst one because it commits the laziest, saddest, most terminal remake mistake: it takes atmosphere and replaces it with explanation. John Carpenter’s The Fog is not about ghosts attacking a town but about weather carrying guilt. It is about old coastal sin rolling back in on the night air. The fog itself is the menace because it feels ancient, patient, almost liturgical. The town’s history is not just backstory. It is the reason the whole place feels spiritually exposed. You can smell the salt and the secret together.

The remake keeps trying to make the haunting more explicit, more romanticized, more narratively connected in an ordinary screenplay way, and every one of those choices hurts it. Once the ghosts become more legible and the story becomes more explanatory, the fog stops being a presence and becomes transportation. That is death for this material. A movie called The Fog should understand that the title itself is the promise. It should be about formlessness moving with purpose. About uncertainty becoming dread. About visibility being morally compromised. This version gives you polished supernatural bookkeeping where there should have been a curse. And that is why it ends up at the bottom. The original drifts. The remake just arrives.