Wow another Frenchman who thinks he understands Americana Horror

Rating: 2/10 (13 March 2006)

What made Craven's original frightening was the mirror-like story line. The happy camper going family fought, loved, bickered and so on. The anti-social bad guys also fought, loved, bickered and so on. Did I say storyline. I'm sorry, there is no story. There wasn't a story in the first one either but there were scares and tension and it's odd that the director Aja directed another poor movie called High Tension and both were devoid of tension. Gore? Yes. Logic? None. When will film makers tackle the realities of people in peril? My answer . . . never. All the characters in this version behave as though they have never seen a horror film. All of them behave as if they were never taught the basics of survival. A) You don't split up. B) You don't walk back to the gas station and C) you don't follow the dogs into the hills. Furthermore, the trite explanation of the why the hill people are the way they are is so lame. Yea, right. Atomic testing. Abandoned town. Radiation. Yea, right. Okay. And I guess there is hope for us when the bomb is dropped. I mean the mutants in this movie survived insurmountable odds after the fallout. We can too! I don't know fellow horror fans, but I'm getting tired of torture being passed off for good horror films. Perhaps it's time to invent a new genre. Let horror return to real scares, thrills and tension. Let the sadists cum snuff film wanna-bes make "Torment Films" rather than "Horror Films". Ripping flesh, gallons of blood, no character investment and dopey dialog, not to mention a poor French filmmaker re-inventing the word vapid.