Every time I see another remake roll out in theaters I get flashbacks to my days as a deprived, abused youngster: Mom walks out onto the porch as us kids are trying to peel the latest road kill off the street and calls us in to dinner. There on the table, covered in crinkled aluminum foil, is the casserole that we had not only the night before, but the night before that as well. There's really nothing like three-day-old casserole to get a kid longing for adoption.

There's also nothing like a film remake to get a cinephile longing for a Paris Hilton melodrama. At least that's new. There's just no such thing as "fresh squeezed" when it comes to creative juice in Hollywood.

Director Jonathan Demme is already responsible for butchering the 1963 thriller "Charade" in the 2002 remake "The Truth About Charlie." You'd think that would disqualify him from trying another remake, but I guess someone lost the blacklist because he's managed to ruin another classic. The updated "Manchurian Candidate" replaces the Korean War and the evil brain-washing Chinese with the Gulf War and an evil corporation determined to get Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) into the presidency. The fly in the ointment is Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), Shaw's commanding officer and one of many soldiers from their outfit having bad dreams years later that don't quite jibe with the company line about Shaw's heroics that service his budding political career.

As Raymond creepily ascends toward the Vice Presidency and his mother, Eleanor (Meryl Streep), orchestrates every move, Marco runs around knocking on doors and doing Internet searches in a frenzied effort to figure out who's behind it all. You can tell Marco is frenzied because there's a direct correlation between his level of anxiety and the nappiness of his hair. Whenever there's a nappiness alert in the film, you know Marco is close to discovering something really important.

During his investigation, Marco enlists the help of Rosie (Kimberly Elise), a suspiciously innocent grocery store clerk, and Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight), the man Shaw bumped from the VP spot. Frankly, I think Voight's estrangement from daughter Angelina Jolie has worn on his acting skills. When a former Oscar winner is reduced to making films like "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" and "The Karate Dog," his very presence in something even modestly legitimate just seems to send ripples of tension right through the screen.

I wish somebody would have asked me about this remake before it happened, because I would have voted to leave "The Manchurian Candidate" alone.