LOOK AWAY NOW! FIVE OTHER ODDLY JUDGED ADAPTATIONS

1 TWIST (2021)

Poor Charles Dickens. Before Steven Knight’s recent BBC adaptation of Great Expectations featuring a drug-addicted Miss Havisham came this dire, updated film version of Oliver Twist by director Martin Owen. It’s almost admirable how strenuously Owen mars everything that is good and soulful about the original book.

The eponymous hero is now a grubby-mouthed graffiti artist, played by Raff Law yapping away in bad Cockney. Rita Ora is a sultry Artful Dodger, using parkour to escape the police. And Michael Caine is confined to a wheelchair as tech mastermind Fagin. Poor Michael Caine.

2 PETER PAN & WENDY (2023)

Versions of JM Barrie’s tale have often bred controversy – David Lowery’s is the latest.

Some sniped that Wendy’s beefed-up role and a notably wimpy Peter Pan unbalanced the story. While others objected to the bleak and barren setting which looked less like Neverland and more like a soggy October half-term on Barra.

But what did they expect? Lowery is the mind behind the bracingly weird The Green Knight beloved by critics – but thoroughly perplexing to the general public.

3 WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY (2023)

Copyright is a strange and precious thing. It protects artistic integrity, enriches IP lawyers – and might have once prevented a gonzo British filmmaker from turning the wholesome tales of Pooh Bear and his Hundred Acre wood chums into a grisly slasher horror.

No longer. Answering the question no one wanted answered – what if Pooh (left) turned serial killer and developed a taste for human flesh? – Blood and Honey is the debut effort of Rhys FrakeWaterfield, who set upon AA Milne’s tales after the 95-year copyright expired. This paper’s critic described the film as “so amateurishly made that it is often hard to see and hear what’s going on”. Next on the director’s hit list of “reimaginings”? A Peter Pan with a drug-addicted Tinkerbell. Yes, really.

4 THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING (2007)

The early noughties gave us tepid versions of CS Lewis’s Narnia books, an ineffective tilt at Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – and this dark, grim take on Susan Cooper’s much-loved The Dark is Rising novel sequence.

It starred Alexander Ludwig (right) as the teenage hero, Ian McShane as his mentor and Christopher Eccleston as the evil Rider. But the top-drawer cast couldn’t

paper over its soullessness, iffy CGI, and remoteness from the original books. Even Susan Cooper distanced herself from it – not because of its (poor) quality, but because as an atheist she objected to the overt Christian mission of its director, David L Cunningham.

5 FÜNF FREUNDE/ FAMOUS FIVE (2012)

There’s nothing objectively terrible about this adaptation. Or at least, not as far as someone with limited German can tell. But on the basis of the gratingly cutesy trailer, let’s go out on a limb and say it looks awful. Sure, Timmy is an authentically woofy hound and the gang race about on bikes solving crimes – in this case, involving experiments on a mysterious island – but at one point, the Five steal a hovercraft, which sure didn’t happen in Enid Blyton’s novels. And – horror of horrors – George wears a beanie. Schändlich! That said, we are confident it will be rather more palatable than the version the BBC has in the works.