Producer Wes Craven remakes his 1977 low-budget shocker about a family terrorized by cannibalistic mutants in the New Mexico desert, handing over the director’s chores to French gore hound Alexandre Aja (High Tension). The original premise, that the predators were irradiated during government H-bomb tests, is even more ridiculous now that the action takes place four decades after the nuclear test ban treaty, though a bigger makeup budget allows the filmmakers to create a clan in which even the little girls look like Rondo Hatton. Some may condemn this gruesome, heartless exercise (2006), but I prefer to savor the irony: three years after the Francophobia that accompanied Operation Iraqi Freedom, every bonehead in America was lining up to see a Frenchman’s movie about subhuman hillbillies. R, 107 min.
