Luckily for me, this weekend was a horror double feature, so I got to see a much better movie too. Also, I watched them in the correct order. I feel like maybe there’s something wrong in my head that causes remakes not to bother me. I mean, in advance. Many of them bother me after the fact, and yet I continue to reserve judgment. Luckily, the person who remade The Hills Have Eyes understood the spirit of the original movie. That is, that sometimes and for no good reason, people accidentally cross some invisible line and step out of the everyday world and directly into hell. They don’t deserve it, and it’s usually upon them before they even realize that anything is wrong. Before they can realize that anything is wrong, because it still looks and sounds and smells just like the regular world. But then, that’s what makes it horrifying.

Of course, after doing all of that so very properly, they had to go and drain a lot of my goodwill by tacking on five minutes’ worth of Godzilla-style morality tale into the climactic third of the movie. Other than that, though, and some over the top orchestration? Really good stuff. Second-best movie of the year so far.