Well. I finally got around to seeing this. I meant to see it in the theaters, honestly, but for some reason I just didn’t make it. Even with all the talk of it being one of the best horror movies made in years and breaking new ground and all that. Turns out that’s not quite the case. This movie is easily one of the most referential things I’d ever seen in my life, almost swiping entire scenes from a whole hand full of movies. If you saw it you know what I mean, if you didn’t, here’s a quick run down of just the first bit…

The “ripping the tubs out at the hospital” scene is totally 28 Days Later
The “driving through windy hills shot from above” scene is totally The Shining
The “creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere” scene is totally Evil Dead
The lake they keep driving past looks like it’s straight out of Friday The 13th
Every forest scene is straight out of Deliverance
Once they are in the caves they alternate from Alien to Blair Witch. And they do it with supper attention to details, all the way down to the dripping slime from the Alien Mutants mouth while he’s watching them and they don’t know it and the shaky camcorder vision.
And the mutants themselves, was it just me or were they just the orcs from Lord of the Rings sans armor.
And finally, The blond girl covered in blood running around getting revenge is so Carrie it hurts.

I know this is a British film originally, but do people there not notice this kind of shit?

First off – there were far too many, force scares in the first part of it. You know, building tension and then a cat jumps out and makes the audience jump kind of stuff. This is a scary idea, and a scary movie and I’m not sure why those kind of carnival pranks were thrown in. It made it really hard to get into the groove of the flick. However once it got past those, and into the meat of the story things improved considerably. Some of the stranded family members were so annoying you actually wanted them to get killed, and when they did it was rather satisfying. Watching it you could definitely sense that they were being watched and they knew it. And the mutants were fantastic.

What wasn’t fantastic and where the whole thing fell apart in my perspective was when Doug finds the town. A town full of mannequins that has been through a nuclear blast and abandoned for at least 50 years is creepy. A mutant family living in the midst of it is really creepy. A mutant family living in a house full of mannequins that has been hit with a nuclear blast and abandoned for at least 50 years who never touched or changed anything is bullshit. Especially when one of those mutants (who looked like Chunk from The Goonies) has already shown that the littlest think will set him off and cause him to smash everything in sight. In one scene when they run through the living room the table still has a picture perfect place setting that was clearly from the testing days. O RLY? This mutant family has been living here for all these years and they never moved a single plate? Sure they rig up generators and fill one room with a hundred TV, they install a meat cooler to store chopped off body parts but they don’t move a stupid mannequin off the stairs so they don’t have to walk around it to get to the second floor?

I found myself thinking “Oh come on” and “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me” more times than I’d like to during a horror movie. Of course blood drenched Doug does turn it around the beat some serious mutant ass so I can’t really complain too much. I also liked that this version didn’t show as much of the mutants chatting each other up as the original which made them seem a bit more mysterious and a lot scarier. Except for the Chunk looking one, I just wanted someone to give him a Baby Ruth.