This week saw the debut of Bangkok Dangerous, a bizarrely titled remake by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun of the bizarrely titled Bangkok Dangerous by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun.  The main differences between the two films are that the original was in the Thai language; the star of the 1999 original, Pawalit Mongkolpisit, played a deaf-mute with a slightly less ridiculous haircut than Nicholas Cage sports in the remake; and the second version stinks like the underside of a refrigerator.

Alison Willmore at IFC.com, in left-handed honor of Bangkok Dangerous, prepares a list of other English-language remakes of foreign films by the original directors, and in so doing, illustrates that, though the filmmakers are gambling that a U.S. release will net them the fame and increased audience foreign films rarely receive, it's a sucker's bet.  Such movies are almost invariably disasters, from Les Visiteurs, a blockbuster French comedy remade in 2001 as the moronic Just Visiting to the pointless reboot of Michael Haneke's Funny Games in 2007. Perhaps the most disastrous of these movies was The Vanishing, a witless remake if George Sluizer's heart-stopping 1988 thriller Spoorloos that completely deflated all the tension and menace of his original.  (Sluizer's latest movie was a Rob Schneider vehicle, which is cruel and unusual punishment even for a man who did The Vanishing.)

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