Directors recycle big screen classics into modern masterpieces.

Byline: Glenn Lovell

The great John Huston, whose resume included "The African Queen" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," had little good to say about his industry's maddening habit of repeating itself. "Don't remake good movies," the director once groused. "Remake bad ones!"

What would Huston think of the current glut of Hollywood remakes? Everywhere you look these days there are big-budget redos: "Dawn of the Dead," "Ned Kelly" and "The Ladykillers" _ all, ahem, "re-imaginings" of cult favorites.

They follow in the choppy wake of numerous star-vehicle remakes, including "Swept Away" with Madonna, "Cheaper by the Dozen" with Steve Martin, "Freaky Friday" with Jamie Lee Curtis, "Ocean's Eleven" with George Clooney, and "The Italian Job," "Planet of the Apes" and "The Truth About Charlie" (a modern-day "Charade") all with Mark Wahlberg, Hollywood's Remake King.

Technically speaking, the last two best-picture Oscar winners were remakes. "Chicago" is a musical version of the silent "Chicago" from 1927 and "Roxie Hart" from 1941, and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy owes something to Ralph Bakshi's animated "LOTR," which covered a book-and-a-half of the trilogy in 1978.

Around the corner:

_"Walking Tall" (April 2), with the Rock now meting out vigilante justice in a Pacific Northwest town full of drug dealers;