Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

One of the most famous setting swapped adaptations of a novel ever made, in 1979 John Milius wrote and Francis Ford Coppola directed Apocalypse Now (1979), an iconic war movie that turned Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella about an ivory trader gone mad being tracked down in Africa, Heart of Darkness, into a film about a special forces legend (Marlon Brando) gone rogue in the jungles of Vietnam. But in 2001, Coppola recut the movie featuring a ton of scenes that he'd had to cut when making the original, threw in a few new songs, cleaned up a bit of color balancing issues, and released the new version of the film as Apocalypse Now Redux (2001). Essentially, during the Vietnam War, burnt out officer Bill Kilgore (Martin Sheen) gets ordered to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a former Special Forces Officer who has become a sort of god to the Natives he now leads. Down the river Kilgore goes, encountering everything from surfing soldiers and Playboy bunnies to spear slinging natives, a drugged-out Dennis Hopper, and even a tiger. But while that movie became an iconic piece of American cinema, there were a few scenes Coppola really struggled to cope with having to leave out. There are two major ones that Coppola must've been kicking himself for deleting. The first was a scene where Kilgore and his crew make a pit stop at a French Plantation where they meet a gang of wealthy French farmers who refuse to leave their land, despite France having lost their own war with the Vietnamese already. But the scene that Francis really dropped the ball by leaving it on the cutting room floor was the one where our GIs meet up with some double D'd damsels in distress. Yes, after we see the Playboy girls doing their sexy dances as part of a morale boosting trip, theirs becomes an oral trip after their helicopter runs out of gas and they need our friends to give them a hand. Obviously, they make sure to give our boys a special kind of thank you, which lets us see Cynthia Wood and Colleen Camp completely topless. Linda Carpenter did plenty of jiggling during her stage performance but doesn't end up with one of the fellas. Meanwhile, Aurora Clement shows her hooters to Kilgore as the French farmgirl of our fever dreams. If going to Nam meant doing women who look like that, it doesn't seem all that bad in Apocalypse Now Redux!