Far Superior to the Original, huge political allegory

Rating: 8/10 (12 March 2006)

I was really nervous going into this movie. I knew it was going to be intense, and I knew it was going to be absolutely brutal.
There were a couple unintentional laughs in the movie, and a few parts where I wanted to groan. I was scared, I was grossed out, and I found myself noticing things about it more and more as I thought about it. The more time goes by, the more I like this movie. A lot of it has to do with some of the things i've read recently on IMDb's message boards. I didn't come up with all of these ideas alone.
Despite the view of movies like this as being just "grindhouse trash", some of them have a lot to say. Alessandro Aja is somewhat well-known for his previous movie, High Tension. This movie takes many of the same themes (losing your humanity to protect a loved one, isolation) and explores them in a much more straight-up manner. As opposed to his previous film, this one also contains some really blatant political statements.
For those of you who don't know, the film is about a regular family traveling through the desert to California. They stop at a gas station and are given directions to a short cut that turns out to lead them right into an old government testing facility for nuclear bombs. In the 40s and 50s, miners lived in the area and were told to leave for the testing. Some of them didn't, and their descendants became deformed cannibals. The guy who runs the gas station is the father of one of these people, and he sends in normal families to get killed in exchange for their valuables. In the beginning of the movie, he wants to quit, but he sends in one last family because he's afraid they might suspect something's up with him.
The father of the "normal family" is an ex-detective and an old-fashioned conservative republican. He carries guns and swears by them. He's not a bad guy at all. His son-in-law, Doug, is a democrat, against guns, and later on becomes the main focus of the story. They make a pretty big point of their political positions early on in the movie, so it's very much worth mentioning. I think that what the mutants represent is a little less obvious, but they're supposed to be the new, Bush-style rabid redneck Neocons. Feeding off of average Americans. That seems far-fetched but when you think about it a lot, it becomes obvious.
The family ends up in the desert, totally cut off from the rest of the world. There's a scene in which they take someone and crucify him and burn him in front of the rest of this family. At first I took this scene as just a blatant effort to be shocking, but than realized that it really shows how the Neocons have hijacked Christianity for their own ends.
This was also an allegory for the Iraqi war. I refer to a scene in which one of the mutants sings "The Star Spangled Banner" and had an exposition speech about how "we were made to be like this". Looking back, it's pretty straightforward even with the argument between Doug and the father, where the dad won't listen to anyone and Doug insists that they need a plan. Furthered by the youngest son foolishly flailing his gun but not really getting anything done.
By the end of the movie, Doug is forced to go into the village of the mutants to save a loved one. The place where they live is actually a government-built test town of modern-at-the-time houses, full of mannequins, each tagged to be studied by the government after the bombs. I think the mutants living in the dilapidated 1950s style homes of the facility could refer to the Neocons' trumpeting of what they refer to as old fashioned family values. The decayed state of the buildings is highlighting the actual unsavoriness of the Neocon way of life, while the mannequins are presented as what "normal" families should be doing, a stark contrast to how they live.
Last but not least, the depths of inhumanity and brutality that Doug is forced to go to to save the said loved one is a really interesting counterpoint. He has to sink to the level of the mutant freaks in order to save her. And sadly, in the end, it proves futile. In the last seconds of the movie, we see that there are still mutants watching, and they are not going to survive much longer. I think that is where the meaning of the tag-line "The lucky ones die first" comes in. This also refers to the atomic bombs, the people in the center die first and don't become radiated.
Not to mention the Carters completely destroyed their home by blowing it up to destroy one of the mutants. It is not at all a stretch to say that represented why bombs are bad.
Ultimately, it's about the loss of your humanity and being forced to become a brutal psychopath to defend yourself, even though that was completely against what Doug normally would have done.
Yes, it was very brutal and disturbing and contained some DEFINITE things that are not at all appropriate for the weak-stomached, but I absolutely loved this movie. 9/10