OK, for those that don't know: 'Stepford Wives' boils down to this: guy and his wife move from New York to this picturesque town where everything is seemingly perfect. Guy settles in, loves it, joins the "Men's Association", while the wife gets weirded out at the fact that all the town ladies seem to be perfect housewives, to a fault. Her only real friend is one who just recently moved in. As the movie progresses, even the friend, out of nowhere, becomes one of them, until you finally discover that the men of this town have all exchanged their wives for a perfect copy (ostensibly a robot, though this is never specifically shown or stated), and our heroine, at the end, is killed and replaced by her copy. A creepy story, well done, suspense nicely built up, fairly well acted and shot. Overall, a good thriller.
Then there's the remake...right off the bat, they tried to add a bunch of funny lines and situations to it, making it a bit of a comedy. Mistake number one. The ending was rewritten so that chick DOESN'T get replaced, they just think she is, and she helps her husband take down the system. Mistake number two. On top of all this, they just shoehorned in all kinds of excess attempts at excess plot, and in the end, what was happening and why and how made no sense. Plot holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through, side-by-side with inconsistencies which were apparently just ignored during the entire production. The acting was weak, the clichés were grossly overstated, the story was spoon-fed from the very beginning, and the "morals" were ham-handedly shoved in with no regard for the film at all. Even Christopher Walken, who I normally think is fabulous, just bombed here.
I wasn't quite as disgusted as I expected to be, since it wasn't an outright comedy (the basic points of the story were still there, and thus it was a little "dark", but not really), but I was a still very disappointed. Turning a horror flick into a comedy...what's next, Saturday morning kid's show "Freddy's Playhouse On Elm Street"?
