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Too often are remakes nothing short of awful garbage with their unnecessary story changes (Halloween would be a good example), shitty casts (most remakes, but The Grudge & Sarah Michelle Gellar, for example) and plain blasphemy (running zombies in Dawn of the Dead).

While these... "Details", on their own, might not always be enough to ruin the remake, It does seem that people making them know it doesn't matter what they do, remakes bring 'em big bucks.
So basically, what we get is a movie remade with worse cast, lazy delivery and unnecessary - and often horrible - changes.
Sometimes, movies can only barely be called remakes, because it simply seems they changed pretty much everything.

Oh, and this might make me seem extremely butthurt and/or bitter, but often times people who liked a remake had never even heard of the original.
This can be a good or a bad thing, depends on how you look at it.
I also think that in some cases, they don't stress the fact that it is indeed a remake and seem to be marketing it as an original piece instead.

The bottom line is, remakes are usually completely unnecessary pieces of crap that, on top of all, have the potential to stain the original's name.
And before you ask "unnecessary, how?", think Dawn of the Dead.

Your opinions?

I never said that movie was the first one to feature running zombies.
Hell, they had those in The Return of the Living Dead, which is an '85 movie.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the time remakes are a bit pointless. If the original movie was good enough for you to want to pay tribute to it, why try to remake it in the first place?

To add the the list of crappy remakes, I've never liked the Gone in Sixty Seconds remake. I understand that they tried to give it more of a plot and characterization (both of which the original lacked) but in doing so they took away the whole point of the GISS series, to have epic car chases. It's also a case of a new movie becoming really well known, but still no one has ever seen the 1974 original.

Not all remakes are horrible, though. Some can be done very well. Case in point, the 1997 remake of Vanishing Point. It kept the same car, basic characters, and narrative style. (that being a story told as a series of flashbacks) However, it added enough new stuff, like a concrete antagonist which the original lacked, and a motivation for the main character that it felt like a fresh movie. I don't consider it as good for my own personal reasons, but it's still a good movie on it's own.

I agree about the zombie re-makes it doesn't have that flair and the work put in it. I mean the movie makers didn't have all that fancy technology and had to make things up or improvise.

I just hope they don't re-do Freddy the Halloween was okay though Rob Zombie's re-make were decent.

I get iffy on the subject unless it's terribly rotten.