5 Upcoming Remakes of 80s Movies (That Must be Stopped)

5 Red Dawn

Communists invade America by paratrooping into a small, Colorado town. But they didn't count on running into a scrappy group of teens with a truckload of guns and everything to prove.

Why It Made Sense Then:

If you don't remember the 80s, just imagine listening to Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" playing on a boom box that at any moment could explode, killing you and everyone you know.

It was the peak of the Cold War, and America was basically standing around in parachute pants waiting for Armageddon to start. Back then, we all pretty much expected that one day we'd glance out the window during study hall and see a sky full of Communist paratroopers.

Now, how the bad guys in Red Dawn flew several thousand miles in hundreds of aircraft undetected until they suddenly landed on a high school football field in Colorado isn't really explained, but you couldn't put anything past those crafty Ruskies. Not a teenager who saw that movie at the time doubted it.

We also didn't doubt that our high school football team was badass enough to turn those fuckers back! WOLVERINES!

Why It Doesn't Now:

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, screenwriter Carls Ellsworth says the new Red Dawn will be an updated version, set in today's world. So, we're assuming that eliminates a contingency of Soviet and Cuban forces as the enemy. The producers have said they will update the threat to be more in keeping with a "post 9/11" mindset, which is just a nice way of saying all Middle Easterners and brown people in general.

There's the problem. Right now we're not in the heart of a massive arms race with another superpower, who at any moment could brazenly try to take over America despite the best efforts of Colorado's proudest high school football program. We know how the modern terrorist attacks. They're not the "paratrooping" type and they're not going knock over the government and set up re-education camps. So how in the hell is our band of teenagers hiding in the mountains going to make any sense?

And, uh, not to get all political here, but notice how all through Red Dawn the Commies refer to the kids as "insurgents?" Where else do you hear that term in the news these days? That's right, their movie is going to ask you to root for scrappy insurgents fighting with homemade weapons against an invading force, in a world where, in reality, we're the military superpower hunting down those kinds of people.

Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't They Remake It?

The original Red Dawn populated its cast with all the big teen celebrities of its day, which means there's at least a half chance we'll get a Red Dawn featuring some High School Musical bastards and at least two Jonas brothers.

4 Weird Science

Sick of being picked on, two scrawny nerds with everything to prove create the perfect woman using the strange and mystical power of computers. When the computer is struck by lightning, the woman comes to life because screenwriter John Hughes has never seen a computer.

Why It Made Sense Then:

Lightning + Technology = Magic was just a standard formula for the 80s. It worked in Weird Science, and it worked in Short Circuit, (Hey, they're remaking that, too! Fuck!).

How amazing it must have been in the 80s to not exactly know the limitations of computers. The newness of computers and the fact that the internet was just a distant fraction of a thought meant that technology could be whatever we wanted it to be. Two nerds take a computer, throw in a dash of lightning and create life? Sure, why the fuck not? We leave our toaster on the roof during every electrical storm because we desperately hold out hope for that very thing to happen in real life.

Someday...

Why It Doesn't Now:

You're on the internet right now. Look around at all the options on your browser. Refresh. Stop. Home. Any "Create Life" buttons? No? Not one? Hm. Do you see anywhere at all that you can just feed cutout pictures from Playboy, automatically combine those pictures to form the perfect woman and then bestow sentience upon that woman? No? Get outta town!

You mean this isn't how technology works?

In 1985 you could treat the home computer as a god-like box of magic (movies today do the same with genetics and nanotechnology), but that pill is just a little bit harder to swallow now that most people own and work on several different computers. And none of them can even get Windows fucking Vista to work properly.

Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It?

You may have heard that a shitty Sims movie is also in the works, but what you might not have heard is that it's going to be almost exactly like Weird Science. Somehow. So we basically have two remakes of movies that don't need to be remade in the first place with premises that will not work today. Why not be the bigger man, Actual Weird Science Remake, and politely bow out, and let The Sims Movie be the one to shit all over our childhood?

Sick of getting picked on, a scrawny kid with everything to prove stands up to bullies, wins the girl and saves the day using karate.

Why It Made Sense Then:

The 80s were a decade of fads, and this movie's titular ancient martial art was the fad of choice for teenagers who pictured themselves thrashing every bully in school at once with a blur of hands and feet.

Knowing its audience to a degree that borders on cynical, The Karate Kid functioned as propaganda for nerds who wanted to believe they could basically learn to use the Force if they just met the right Asian custodian.

Why It Doesn't Now:

Of course, what the news really meant was that, like the meat at McDonald's, the karate at the McDojos was a bullshit imitation slowly poisoning an entire generation. And not in the badass way that bad dojos poisoned people in The Karate Kid - making you roam the night with your motorcycle gang kicking nerds off cliffs. McDojos fed them a much lamer poison: the mistaken belief that yelling "yah" when you slapped at someone gave you the ability to defend yourself.

Of course all that really did was make you look ridiculous in the moments immediately before getting your ass kicked. American kids eventually figured out that their sensei was the same guy that taught their mom's aerobics class, and karate fell off the continental shelf of cool and assumed its current slot next to boy scouting on the depth charts of awesome.

At best, kids today know karate as the reason Asian people could fly a long time ago, at worst, the 80s version of disco. The only possible sliver of hope for a remake would be giving it to an awesome director who understood that the only enjoyment anyone gets out of the original is the ironic, nostalgic kind.

Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It?

The producers decided to go in another direction, and give it to a rapper-turned-actor-turned-inexperienced-director. Also, instead of having a proper audition process for the lead role, they decided to allow this director to put in his kid as the star.

That's right, Will Smith plans on putting this remake through his production company, Overbook Entertainment, directing it, and making his son, 9-year-old Jaden Smith, the star. How about getting your wife Jada a role, too, so no other family in Hollywood makes money off of this? Hell, just announce the casting of D.J. Jazzy Myagi already so we can get this whole abomination over with.

2 Friday the 13th

A chainsaw-wielding maniac with everything to prove murders a bunch of negligent camp counselors who just want to have sex with each other.

Why It Made Sense Then:

Friday the 13th got in on the slasher craze early and bothered to bring something new to the table. The movie leads you to believe that Jason's rotting corpse is stalking the camp killing everyone, only to pull the rug out from under you at the end by revealing that it was his angry mother all along. It told you a ghost story, and then made you feel retarded for believing in ghosts. This was all mind blowing before M. Night Shyamalan started jamming twist endings down your throat every chance he got.

It wasn't just a more innocent time at the movie theater. As a country, we just didn't really give a shit about anything in the 80s. Smoking laws were more relaxed, seat belts weren't mandatory, and a little up-and-comer named crack cocaine was poking its twitchy little head around the corner. It was a simpler time, when a woman could say "My son drowned because your counselors were off having sex " and the owners of the camp could respond "Yeah, I hear ya lady. But seriously, eat shit. Camp stays open."

Why It Doesn't Now:

First of all, negligent counselors let a kid drown and they didn't close the camp? Can you imagine that camp staying open today? Today's moms bitch so much that elementary schools across the nation are instituting separate tables and in some cases separate cafeterias to accommodate kids with peanut allergies. Jason's mom may as well be avenging a stage coach robbery.

Then there's the twist ending, the best part of the first movie. The one that asks us to believe that it was a thin middle aged woman who killed all those teenagers and tossed their bodies through a window. We suppose that made as little sense in the 80s as it does now (though modern audiences are just the sorts of assholes to point something like that out). But how about the fact that they're remaking a movie with a twist ending at all? How do you do that?

These people don't know either.

Is the twist ending this time going to be that it wasn't his mom? That there is no twist? Of course, it won't be the first time someone tried to remake a horror movie with a twist ending.

We didn't see Pyscho with Vince Vaughn, but we imagine it sucked.

Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It?

We don't even know how many Friday the 13th movies have been made, but we know enough to know that they've broken every rule, tested the limits of every premise and retconned every death enough times that the series shouldn't technically exist anymore. Hasn't this franchise reached its boiling point as far as absurd plot holes by now? Seriously, take a brief look at some of the previous Fridays and see how things almost immediately start falling to shit.

Friday the 13th (original)

"Jason is revealed to be...Ma Voorhees, killing camp counselors as revenge for a couple of fornicating counselors that left her son to drown all those years ago."

Friday the 13th Part II

"OK, nevermind about the death of Jason. He's alive and wants to go on a murderous rampage to avenge the death of his mother who was killed avenging his death that never actually happened. "(???)

Friday the 13th Part III

"Let's do Part II again, but in a barn!"

Friday the 13th: Final Chapter

"Same, as the others, but with Corey Feldman now. Feldman hacks him to death with a machete."

Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives

"Okay, nevermind about the machete hacking, it was the kind that you can bounce back from with just a little old fashioned know-how. Also, there is murder."

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

"Let's do Part II again, but on a boat! Yeah we couldn't afford a set that looks like Manhattan."

Jason X

"Have we done space yet? Let's do space. Take the original script, replace 'teens' with 'astronauts,' 'machete' with 'liquid nitrogen' and 'plot' with 'space.' I'm taking lunch, I want this movie made by 5pm tomorrow."

You may notice the entire series consists of finding new places and ways for Jason to kill teenagers. You'll also notice they never brought back Ma Vorhees, probably because someone told them that a middle aged woman tossing teenagers around like beanbags didn't make any sense. If it's not about Ma Vorhees, that raises some even more mind boggling questions, such as: Won't it just be a remake of the shitty sequels that took place at Crystal Lake? Why not just call it a sequel then? Is there any possible scenario in which this film makes sense? Sadly only one of those questions has an answer.

Sick of being picked on, a scrawny America with everything to prove trains a squad of cocky, excitable navy flyboys who get shirtless with alarming regularity.

Why It Made Sense Then:

This is another Russia-related problem. Really, the overall calming-down of Russia has seriously negatively impacted our ability to remake 80s movies. The whole point of Top Gun was to train pilots to dogfight with Russians in an air-battlefield dubbed "the Danger Zone," which they reached by way of a complex air-highway.

At the end, they did engage in a dogfight with the Russians. And it was fucking awesome. Though for all we know it was that incident that spurned the Russians to retaliate in Red Dawn.

Why It Doesn't Now:

Lot of jet action in today's war going on? Big demand for skilled dogfighters for all those scary air skirmishes? No? Hm. I guess that leads us to the question: What the hell would we be training these pilots for? The Iraqis didn't even put their jets into the air, not wanting to waste the gas they would have burned in the fifteen seconds it would have taken all of them to get shot down. It's true they're trying to buy fighter jets now. From us.

"These dogfights would be a lot easier if they didn't also have planes.

So, are there a bunch of highly trained Al Qaeda fighter pilots that the news media bizarrely refuses to acknowledge? Are we training to fight the Chinese? That would be awkward, considering everything from their uniforms to the electronics in the planes are probably made there.

But beyond that, Top Gun was a chest beating, ultra patriotic movie with zero doubt in America's righteousness. Problems with Russia? No big deal, just pour some America on that sumbitch and watch the freedom come soaring in.

The political climate has changed slightly in the last couple of decades, to say the least. You may have noticed the war movies of today not only cast a critical eye on American foreign policy, but actually give names and faces to our enemies. We never saw the enemies that Maverick and Iceman so giddily shot down over the Indian Ocean (they politely covered their faces), but we couldn't get away with that today. Kenny Loggins just doesn't have a song for morally ambiguous wars with no easy solutions.

Okay, But Why ELSE Shouldn't We Remake It?

Every movie on this list is an awkward and misguided attempt to cash in on nostalgia, but Top Gun is probably the worst offender because it makes the least sense, like the producers printed out the Wikipedia page on popular 80s movies, threw a dart and greenlit a remake for wherever the dart landed.

To make matters worse, like a tiny, excitable moth to a flame, Tom Cruise is hoping to jump on this project to restore his current image by reminding people how not crazy he used to be. Cruise would be taking over the Tom Skeritt mentor role who teaches a rebellious, cocky young pilot how to straighten up and fly right.

That cocky young pilot? Katie Holmes. Perfect. No way that's going to be awkward and creepy.

We miss you, Hot Katie Holmes.

Replace Val Kilmer with a video of ALF getting sexually assaulted by a Ghostbuster and you'll have officially ruined everything that made growing up in the 80s wonderful.

For more movies you're not going to want to see, check out 5 Upcoming Comic Book Movies That Must Be Stopped. Or for a list we're hoping all five of these movies end up on, check out The 6 Worst Movies Hollywood Almost Made.