Of late, there seems to be a theme around here of bashing remakes. Now, I don’t want to be left out here, so I have compiled a list (I do so love lists) of the five best and five worst film remakes that I have seen.

Not every remake is a terrible cash grab devoid of merit. In fact some can be quite good! Here are the five best remakes that I have witnessed:

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1) The Departed: The Departed is based on a trilogy of Asian films titled Infernal Affairs (pts. 1,2, and 3). I’m not usually a fan of the American Remake of an Asian film (it felt like there was a decade of American horror films made this way), but this was superb. The cast was great, Scorsese was at his directing best, and there were no creepy dead girls crawling out of televisions.

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2) The Thing: A remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, this movie made snow, and WIlford Brimley, scary. Kurt Russell was at his bad-ass-est here, and the creature effects were excellent for their time.

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3) Scarface: The original Scarface was loosely based on Al Capone, and was fun in it’s time. However, when Oliver Stone (the writer) and Brian De Palma (the director) got a chance to update the story, gone were the Capone references, and bootlegging. What replaced them is the machine gun toting, lady-tiger loving man with little friends that we all love to hate. Who would have thought Al Pacino could play cuban?

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4) Munich: Munich was a remake of a Movie called Sword Of Gideon, and both movies are based on the book Vengeance: The True Story Of An Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. This movie is flat out awesome. I don’t care how good the original movie was, this one was directed by Spielberg. Spielberg!

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5) The Fly: In the Original 1958 film of the same name, a scientist and a fly switch heads. The original also featured Vincent Price. Both these are cool, but the 1986 version had Jeff Goldblum as a crazy man-fly! He vomited on( and ate) people!

A special “almost on the list but for a technicality” award goes to Batman Begins for resurrecting the Dark Knight from the oppression of Bat-nipples.

Now, while remakes can sometimes be worthwhile (just look at the list above), most of the time they crap. Sometimes, they are exceptionally crappy. And sometimes they are so tremendously crappy that they make us want to burn down the movie theater just so that no one else has to watch them.  Here are the worst of the worst:

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1) Psycho: The original film is a classic. Even today, Psycho (the original one) is pretty dang scary. In 1998, someone thought it would be a good idea to remake Psycho, and the results were terrible. Like a human/ fly hybrid vomiting on you to eat you terrible. I shudder at the thought of this movie. Shame on you Universal!

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3) Shaft: This movie was devoid of anything that made the orignal awesome. On the plus side, it did have Sam Jackson.

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4) The Day The Earth Stood Still: Any time that you take a movie that has been around for over half a century, and remake it with Keanu Reeves in  the starring role, you are going to fail. This is like a rule of the universe or something.

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5) Godzilla: Um, yeah.

Alright folks, that’s it for today. Have a great weekend, and good luck if your are going out in search of presents, it’s gonna be crazy!