Night 26 of 31 Nights of Horror

Despite how the poster looks, this is not p[art of the Mad Max franchise, it is the second movie written and directed by Wes Craven, and it is much better than some of his later works *cough*peopleunderthestairs*cough*. To set your expectations though, this is a low budget grindhouse film. It doesn’t have the polish of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it still works.

There’s probably a name for this category of film where people are preyed upon by a family of cannibals. It’s not unique and there’s probably a name for it on TV tropes, I’m just too lazy to go look it up. I don’t want to go into too many details, the story is pretty thin, and we aren’t given much in the way of backstory for most of the characters, so almost anything I write would be a spoiler. I’ll just say, I liked the fact that more than one person survives the ordeal, the action is well paced and surprising and once the stranded family figures out what’s happening to them, they get smarter and don’t all fall apart.

It’s not award winning by any stretch, but it’s a fun popcorn movie. It’s surprisingly less graphic than I would have expected for a movie like this, but maybe they cut it down to avoid an X rating. This is one case where I would be interested in seeing the re-make. Maybe that can be the theme for next year.