Patrick Swayze’s Road House could be the best worst movie of all time – who’d be mad enough to remake it?

With its gratuitous nudity and outrageous violence, the original ‘Road House’ was dismissed as ‘vile’, ‘stupid’ and ‘sleazy’ on its release. The new remake is a perplexing proposition, writes Geoffrey Macnab, but with a beefcake Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role, it’s got a fighting chance of being a hit

Patrick Swayze in the raucous 1989 action thriller ‘Road House’ (MGM)

You’ll know the story already. A mysterious drifter rides into the valley. A cattle baron terrorises the local people. The drifter stands up to the villain and his henchmen. It’s a tale that’s been told and retold endlessly down the years, the framework of countless westerns and samurai films. In 1989, Road House offered its own idiosyncratically Eighties spin on this old formula. Instead of the traditional cowboy hero, it has a bouncer (Patrick Swayze) as its protagonist. He rolls into town in a battered old Buick (which he promptly swaps out for a much sleeker Mercedes). As a premise, it’s a winning one, familiar to anyone who’s seen Shane or A Fistful of Dollars. But for all the love Road House has received, it’s also met its fair share of ridicule.

“Boobs and bombs” was how producer Joel Silver (whose other credits include Die Hard and The Matrix) summed up the movie. It was indeed a very strange mishmash. Road House was filmed by its journeyman director Rowdy Herrington in the style of a glorified MTV music video or an Eighties crime series episode – but with some extra nudity thrown in. (This includes fleeting shots of Swayze’s buttocks and scenes in which venal husbands offer local drunks the chance to kiss their wives’ breasts at $20 a pop – or $10 each.) Moments of extreme violence are interlaced with incongruous scenes of Zen-like mysticism. Road House ended up receiving five Razzie nominations for worst film of the year, including Worst Picture and Worst Actor (for Swayze).

Even the film’s champions acknowledge it’s a quintessential Eighties artefact. The cheesy sex scenes. The big hair. The pumped-up rock music (much of it courtesy of blind Canadian bluesman Jeff Healey playing behind a wire fence as beer bottles rain down). It is a very long way removed from today. That is why on paper it seems so strange that Bourne Identity director Doug Liman is looking to reinvent the movie for modern-day audiences. His remake, starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role, will be out on Prime Video in March. But modernising such a towering example of the daft, outdated excesses of 1980s genre cinema may be a battle that even Swayze’s pugilist would lose.