A worthy remake.

Rating: 8/10 (11 October 2006)

The original version was directed by Wes Craven and released in 1977. The plot was loosely based on the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean who headed a family of highway robbers living in a cave that also happened to eat the flesh of their victims. Basically the plot of both movies follows a family traveling across the country in a motor home. The father decides to take the back way out west because it's scenic and of course this puts him in the middle of nowhere. A helpful gas station owner points him towards a shortcut that no one knows about. Unfortunately this seemingly helpful person is in cahoots with a cannibal clan and the road is actually a dead end into their lair. The family becomes stranded in the hot desert with no help and then the battle begins between the cannibals and family. As the cannibals attack their home and taunt them they become desperate to fend them off and find a way.
No one can forget the face of Michael Berryman that graced the cover of the original THHE poster. (If you don't know who I'm talking about he's the guy who was the biker at the end of Weird Science who said "Can we keep this between you and me? I don't wanna lose my teaching job." Apparently he was also the high school principal in Motley Crue's "Smokin' In The Boys Room" video.) The original is definitely a classic but you can forget about the pathetic sequel which even Wes Craven is embarrassed of now. While the original movie is engaging it didn't really explain much about the cannibal family and why they were living out there in the first place.
The remake starts out with an introduction detailing US Army nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. It turns out that the cannibal family were actually miners who refused to vacate their town after the Army selected their home as a test bed for its nuclear program. As a result the survivors have become horribly mutated and hateful of the outsiders that they gleefully prey upon. In the original version our villains are merely weird looking cavemen out in the desert and don't seem as threatening looking back on the movie today. I felt that the remake really did well by making them grotesque and truly barbaric.
Also, in the remake the family explores the cannibals' home. This was never touched upon in the original and for all we knew they just lived in caves. In the remake we find that they live in the old miners caves and also reside in a small village that was built to observe the effects that a nuclear explosion and fallout would have on actual homes. Also, the cannibals store the old marauded cars of their victims in a giant crater that has become one large junkyard which is discovered by one of the family later on in the film.
Overall I felt that the remake really did improve on the original by adding better effects and expanding upon the story in the original. I found it interesting that they were created as the result of experiments our government had done. There is more violence in the movie including a pretty wince inducing scene where the mutants have their way with one of the female characters but it serves to show how depraved these people are.