I was really disappointed in this remake of the 1977 low-budget classic from none other than Wes Craven. Everyone said it was great. Everyone lied. It was long. It was slow. It was long and it was slow. It was painful.
For those not familiar with the premise, a family is taking a trip across the desert on their way to California. At the advice of a questionable gas-station attendant, they take a shortcut through the mountains, thinking they will "save hours". If you're towing a large trailer, do you really want to take a dirt road, no matter how well maintained it looks, through the mountains, with no one around? Come on. I can take a certain amount of leeway, but that's just stupid. Some things, yes, but that's just lame.
Anyway, the family gets stopped by mutants, descendants of the miners who wouldn't leave the area when nuclear testing went on decades ago. Now they live as cannibals, surviving on the bodies of the huge number of people who apparently take this road through the desert mountains. The family settles in, one man goes back for help, one man goes forward for help. The crazies close in, lots of people die, some don't. The end. It's really that bad.
The shortcut doesn't actually go through to anywhere. It dead-ends into a crater, which is a vehicular graveyard of sorts. Yet the mutants use spikes to stop vehicles, and in at least this case, causing a huge amount of damage to the truck. Yet none of those other vehicles seemed to be damaged. And if they've been doing this for decades (and wouldn't they have to have been?), there should have been hundreds of cars, not a dozen. Otherwise how could they have survived?
I don't have a problem with suspending certain aspects of reality for a movie. I don't have a problem with wackos, or even disturbing scenes. Saw was an excellent psycho killer movie, and The Devil's Rejects a disturbing look at a family-style killing spree. This one just came up short.
Rated R for strong gruesome violence and terror throughout, and for language.
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