4 Worst Western Movie Remakes, Ranked

Though it's relentlessly grating to bear witness to Hollywood's obsession with rehashing old material, it can at least be fun to look back at some of the worst remakes ever made. Of course, anyone who embarks on such a mission is spoilt for choice given the sheer amount of horrible remakes littered throughout cinematic history. So we've narrowed things down to the Western genre for this particular list of offenders.

Westerns have been recycled ever since Warner Bros. bought First National Pictures in the 1930s and redid all their silent oaters from the previous decade as talkies. These early Western remakes even helped launch the career of John Wayne, who was cast in the 1932 Western "Ride Him, Cowboy," and many of them were worthwhile. Sadly, that's more than can be said for so many remakes.

Since then, all sorts of Oaters have been reworked, often to great effect. Take the time Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" got a Samurai remake which managed an impressive 94% Rotten Tomatoes score. In fact, the list of genuinely terrible Western remakes is surprisingly slight. For some reason, of the many that have been redone only a handful are truly awful. Even a couple of the entries on this very list are debatable. If you want to see where you stand in that debate, take a look below to see what we dredged up after trawling through the history of Western movies to find the most disappointing remakes in the history of the genre.

"Red River" 1988 is a decent enough take on the 1948 original, featuring some fine performances and frequently evoking the magic of its predecessor. But it also doesn't provide a satisfying answer to the question that plagues almost every remake ever produced: Does this need to exist?

Howard Hawks' 1948 film remains one of the greatest Westerns of all time, delivering a nuanced character study which eschewed the white-hat-vs.-black-hat simplicity of traditional Horse Operas in favor of a much more ambiguous drama that even contained flashes of the revisionist movement that would later come to subsume the Western. The remake was a CBS movie that was never going to measure up. 

It sees the great James Arness take on the role of trail boss Thomas Dunson, played in the original by the even more legendary John Wayne. Bruce Boxleitner portrays his protégé Matthew Garth (previously portrayed by Montgomery Clift) alongside Ray Walston as Nadine Groot, both of whom join Dunson on the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas alongside Black cowboy Jack Byrd (Stan Shaw).

Just like in the original, tensions mount and the various members of the convoy eventually turn on each other. Unlike with the original, however, "Red River" '88 feels a little cheap at times, and while Arness does a decent job in the lead, he's sort of emblematic of the film's biggest problem. As important a figure as Arness is in the history of the Western, the former "Gunsmoke" star wasn't John Wayne, and "Red River" '88 just wasn't Hawks' "Red River." Even the Los Angeles Times' Terry Atkinson, who found the remake to be "a pretty decent way to spend a couple of hours," remarked that, "there's a better one — renting the original."

It's a testament to how emphatically the Western fell from grace that so many celebrated Oaters ended up being given the TV movie remake treatment in the late 20th Century. To cap off the last few decades of that century — which had already given us TV versions of the aforementioned "Red River" and the monolithic "Stagecoach" — TBS decided to gift us all with a small screen version of 1952's "High Noon."

I say "gift"... this remake saw director Rod Hardy take the Gus-Van-Sant-does-Hitchcock route and make pretty much the same movie but with less panache. Tom Skerritt steps in to take on the role of Marshal Will Kane, previously played by Gary Cooper who was saved from a sea of "crappy scripts" by the original "High Noon." In place of Grace Kelly's Amy Kane we get Susanna Thompson's version, and Frank Miller, the man Kane brought to justice years earlier, is now played by Michael Madsen in place of Ian MacDonald. Some minor changes aside, the film otherwise plays out pretty much exactly like the 1952 film, all of which raises that same question that dogs all the entries on this list: Why?

As John Leonard of New York Magazine put it, "There is really no excuse for a remake of 'High Noon,'" before concluding that "this copycat crime is just asking for capital punishment." That said, "High Noon" isn't the most egregious remake, with Variety's Steven Oxman opining "While it may not win a slew of awards, the pic works." Of course it does, it's the same film that achieved legendary status half a century earlier.

John Ford's "Stagecoach" was a hinge moment for the Western, taking the genre from its so-called Poverty Row era of B-moviedom to the most popular Hollywood fare. It remained that way for several decades after, until the 1960s when they started to fall out of favor. It was during that era that Ford's film was recycled for the first time. "Stagecoach" got a 1966 remake that was remarkably good considering what it had to live up to. 20 years later, CBS produced a television version of "Stagecoach" starring Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. This time, there was pretty much nothing redeeming about the movie.

Whereas the original had introduced mass audiences to a young John Wayne and reinvigorated a floundering genre by presenting a complex interrogation of that very genre's archetypes, the 1986 film, well, had The Highwaymen. Willie Nelson played Doc Holliday alongside Kristofferson's Ringo Kid while the great Johnny Cash portrayed Marshal Curly Wilcox. The fourth country songster and fellow Highwayman was Waylon Jennings who played a gambler named Hatfield. The foursome seemed to be having a grand old time in their "Stagecoach" remake but you've simply got to have a better reason for rehashing Ford's masterpiece than teeing up some banter between some good ol' country boys.

It didn't help that CBS skimped on the production and shot the whole thing at Arizona's prefab Old West town "Old Tucson" — which coincidentally was constructed the same year the original "Stagecoach" debuted. A nice little tip of the hat to Ford's era, sure. But it was also a pretty good way of making everything look cheap. Couple that with a troubled shoot and some less than compelling performances and you can see why John J. O'Connor of the New York Times dubbed "Stagecoach" 1986 "merely laughable."

"Wild Wild West" director Barry Sonnenfeld knows what went wrong with the film, but almost three decades later you'd be forgiven for wondering what on earth the filmmakers were thinking. This one isn't technically a remake of a film, instead representing a reimagining of the classic 1960s TV series of the same name. But the sheer shoddiness of this late-'90s misstep means it has earned its place atop our list.

Today, our nostalgia-mad monoculture has produced something like the "Harry Potter" TV series but back in 1999 it seems executives were convinced that the world needed a "Wild Wild West" remake in the form of a blockbuster film starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline, and Kenneth Branagh. The original CBS series ran for four seasons between 1965 and 69 and followed Secret Service agents James West (Robert Conrad) and Artemus Gordon (Ross Martin) on their adventures across the post-Civil War United States taking down various eccentric villains. The 1999 film saw Smith and Kline step into the roles of West and Gordon respectively, while Branagh played villain Dr. Arliss Loveless, all of which made for a historic blunder of a film.

"Wild Wild West" was a box office disaster and the biggest misstep of Smith's career up to that point (imagine a time when "Wild Wild West" was the worst thing Will Smith had ever done). It prompted Roger Ebert to marvel at the way in which it caused viewers to "stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die," and the infamous giant mechanical spider became a symbol for Hollywood excess. At least Smith's Sisqó-assisted "Wild Wild West" single was an absolute banger.