Last year it was sequels, this year it is remakes… perhaps next year they’ll just start re-releasing all the films from the year before, but with a subtly different title.

I say ‘remakes’, but they have a whole bunch of new words for them now… all of them can be identified by the ‘re’.

I can understand the thinking though – it made money last time, why not do it again… but this time we’ll tell everyone it’s even better… the punters liked it last time, so they’re bound to come and see an even better version.

I think the worst offenders are when they try to remake a truly great film. Psycho, for example, is about as good as it gets, yet someone thought, ‘We can’t just re-release it, the kids don’t want black and white films, we’ll have to remake it’. At least they realised that they wouldn’t be able to make a technically better film. They duplicated each of Hitchcock’s shots almost exactly, but even so the film was terrible, a pale,technicolor imitation.

I can’t really think of one remake that I would watch over the original – argh, just remembered the remake ofThe Ladykillers, a bit of me just died – seriously, none at all. Even films that were terrible the first time around don’t generally fare much better.

Take, The Hulk… in 2003 we were subjected to a film that was less than incredible (they even dropped that word from the title) and so in new Hollywood style, it was ‘re-imagined’ and another film called The Hulk was released in 2008 to rather lukewarm reviews. That’s a gap of just five years.

I hear that they started ‘re-visioning’ Ironman before filming wrapped on the first one… it’s due out next month.

Obviously (you know how it goes), I’m interested in which remakes have offended you, but I’m also keen to find out what the worst conceivable remake is.