Agh, great. Second movie today containing a gun pointed at a baby :-/

Like I expected, I found this a lot more watchable than the original ... not that that’s a particularly great thing. Something about this story just really doesn’t work for me from the off. Like the assumption in the cannibal movies that the natives would necessarily have a taste for modern man and a desire to acquire that flesh so violently, I really struggle with the basic assumption here that nuclear tests turn hicks into ugly droogs. I guess it’s the same as aliens always being malevalent in movies too, I guess. I guess I’m just rambling around the basic point that I don’t see the point in setting up the whole nuclear thing when you could just have a bunch of crazy people attack this family in their own suburban home and have basically the same movie.

Anyway, in this incarnation it’s basically RV interrupted by said ugly droogs, and fits right alongside the recent batch of remakes and throwbacks that started with The Texas Chainsaw remake going through House of Wax etc – the slick, glossy, variety of modern horror featuring people really far too pretty for the genre in my opinion.

And here’s where one of my stock lines comes in, I’m afraid – it’s short, slick, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it. Director Alexandre Aja has more style than most (I was annoyed to find he directed Switchblade Romance, which I could’ve watched on TV before this and made a double bill) but mostly he’s at the mercy of whatever modern technology or process it is that makes all of these recent horror movies (the Hostels, Saws, and Zombie’s Halloween among a few others excepted) look pretty much exactly the same lol. Where’s the dirt and sheer griminess of the Seventies? And no – don’t point me in the direction of Grindhouse ‘cos that’s not what I mean. Texas Chainsaw almost had it – but like I said, I swear there’s some kind of Josie and the Pussycats type machine they put these movies through now that strips away all semblance of grit. Tomandandy’s alarmist score is pretty great, though, gotta say.

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