Remakes - Like 3 day old pizza?

It seems that every week there is yet another remake in the Hollywood pipeline and it looks like the ideas well has run dry.
So in their infinite wisdom they go to fridge, find an old slice of pizza and reheat it - adding a bit of extra cheese along the way.
The results are either soggy, tasteless or give you poisoning.
Although just occasionally something good comes of remakes, somehow against the odds the remake manages to find its own feet and trod out a new...ish path.
Since the new/old/prequel of The Thing hits cinemas in Australia this (or last) week, here are some of the remakes that manage to make the three day old pizza taste good...

Yes this list is fairly horror heavy but come on how many horror film remakes are there? Some of them are bound to hit the mark.

The Hills Have Eyes
Remaking a Wes Craven cult classic is a ballsy move because from the get go you are behind the 8-ball.
Yet Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur  manage to rise above it and put together a very good show. Keeping the same basic premise as the original, the two Frenchmen amp up the first attack on the caravan by the mutants then add their own dose of crazy to the mix.
Is there anything more unsettling, than a drooling mutant saying "Baby's Fat! Fat and juicy"...brrrr.

Dawn of the Dead
Before his mega epic films, Zack Snyder made an epic remake of an epic film. Dawn of the Dead - (A remake of George A. Romero's 2nd best zombie film in his catalogue) Zack Snyder creates a nasty, little tale of zombie mayhem.
Eschewing the political and social commentary that Romero has in his film, Snyder uses the same locales and the bare outline of the original film and Snyder does quite well in bringing the film from a straight remake into something that is a great film of its own accord.

The Thing
Mentioning The Thing in the preamble to this list meant that I'd have to include it but to be honest - it pretty much includes itself.
Far removed from the original The Thing from Another World, John Carpenter creates a parasitic alien that assimilates with its victim. When the thing gets flushed out of the human host, that is when this film gets...messy. A film that plays with paranoia as much as it does special effects (which for 1982 are amazing) this is an excellent stand alone film, so much so that you wouldn't even know it was a remake.