More meat for the grinder

Rating: 5/10 (17 October 2013)

The Carter family is traveling across the New Mexico desert on their way to San Diego. On an isolated road, their vehicles run across tire spikes. They don't notice at first, but they have fallen into a trap. They are hunted by a group of cannibalistic society warped by nuclear testing in the area. This is a remake of 1977 Wes Craven horror. The ultra ugly violence is pretty interesting. It's meant to shock and it does that to some extent. It certainly gets very brutal.
The actors are pretty good but the characters are unoriginal. They are certainly better than this B-movie material deserves. The problem is that I didn't really root for the family. Neither did I root against the family. So the tension of their kills aren't maximized. They're just meat for the grinder.
I wish Alexandre Aja could concentrate on one character and make me root for that person. These people are not worthy of my sympathy. They do stupid things like splitting up. The father runs away when he should be attacking like when his dog bites the ax guy. The boy is useless. He's probably the only guy with a gun in the world that is the underdog in a fight with an unarmed guy. It make me want to slap him.... BADLY. And somebody needs to shut Emilie de Ravin up. Sometimes, you can scream too much in a horror movie.