10 Ridiculously Underrated Movie Remakes Everyone Must Watch

Let's face facts. By and large, remakes are by their very nature pretty suspect territory for film fans.

After all, if you've got an original or interesting idea for a film is it likely to be a retread of material already covered by another filmmaker?

And there's no doubt that a lot of the time remakes can be a chance for a new director, writer, producer, and cast to offer their own innovative spin on an idea. Sometimes remakes can even be used as a vehicle to make the superior film which the original movie really should have been.

For example, just look at Halloween director John Carpenter's superb eighties remake The Thing, which reimagined Howard Hawks' corny fifties sci fi as a gory, paranoid body swap horror. Made without Rob Bottin's seminal effects technology, the fifties version could never have achieved what Carpenter's re-do managed.

Or for a more recent example, Carpenter's own gritty thriller Assault on Precinct 13 was remade in 2005 with corrupt cops as the baddies rather than criminal gangs, a neat twist which flipped the film's perspective.

Despite theses occasional successes most viewers are wary of remakes, which results in underrated classics like the ten movies highlighted here, some of which are (whisper it) probably even better than the original films.

Opening on a hilarious cameo from Jaws hero Richard Dreyfuss, The Hills Have Eyes re-maker/ New French Extremity enfant terrible Alexandre Aja's dumb-fun remake of Pirahna wastes no time ensuring cinema goers that this offering from the director wasn't going to be another gruelling self-serious ordeal.

It's hard to know how Aja cheered up so much between films, but where that Wes Craven re-imagining showcased fifteen minute torture porn sequences, this update of Gremlins helmer Joe Dante’s 1978 original is more about constant nudity, silly in-jokes, and inventive comedic gore.

With a cast including fellow controversial helmer Eli Roth, The Karate Kid's Elizabeth Shue, a hilarious Jerry O'Connell, and comedic stalwarts Adam Scott and Paul Scheer, this monster movie may not have the original's satirical verve, but it nonetheless deserved more love than the lukewarm critical reception it was met with.