Oh, I'm sorry -- did I scare you? Did you think, what with all the remake news coming down the pike, that this would be a redo of the distressing 1996 Francis Ford Coppola movie with Robin Williams as an overgrown fifth-grader? No; you're silly. This is something else. This Jack is a "medical thriller" about a doctor who falls in love with an amnesiac patient who, unbeknownst to both of them, is actually a killer. Joseph Ruben will direct from a script by David Venable, whose only feature film credit is on Stuart Gordon's Fortress 15 years ago.

I forfeit all claims of objectivity regarding Ruben's The Good Son -- the Bad Seed rip-off with Macauley Culkin -- which scared the hell out of me when I was 11 and fresh off Home Alone. But I was among the few who liked The Forgotten which, to my mind, played like a good X-Files episode. It was well-shot and surprisingly daring, taking some outlandish left turns along the way; few filmmakers would have had the guts to forge ahead with such an outlandishly direct conception of what an alien abduction would look like. And Return to Paradise is an extraordinary, though little-seen, morality play. Ruben has never had a box-office hit, but I'm glad he's still getting work. Even if Jack does sound awfully trite.

Sigh. This is getting a little ridiculous. I mean, I can understand why someone would want to remake The Amityville Horror or The Omen or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: They're well-known movies that have built-in fanbases and lots of handy "name recognition." But The Stepfather...? I mean ... huh?

Joseph Ruben's 1987 follow-up to the wonderfully doofy Dreamscape, The Stepfather is about a mild-mannered lunatic who slaughters his whole family, only to get cozy with a new one right quick. Unfortunately, the new family doesn't always stack up to Stepdad's lofty standards, which means that knives are more than likely to become involved before all is said and done. Written by genre master Donald E. Westlake, The Stepfather is actually quite the solid little B-movie, and one that features a fantastically unhinged performance by Terry O'Quinn.

So yeah: Screen Gems is remaking the thing, just like they did The Fog and When a Stranger Calls -- which probably tells you all you need to know about the project. No word yet on who'll be writing / directing the remake, but it'll probably be a newcomer and a refugee from MTV.