Watching a scary movie every day is easier when you don’t have stuff going on. Lately I’ve been picking these things later and later at night, and it’s limiting my choices.

This film was rented from iTunes (I’m one of the 6 AppleTV owners out there) and watched starting at about 10:30. I was mostly interested because it’s a recent update of a Wes Craven movie I find genuinely unsettling. It was my first iTunes movie rental that resulted in actual viewing, and I can report that at least that part of the process was painless. The movie was ready to start watching a minute or two after I selected it, it presented in HD and looked pretty good.

So I’ll start with looks. This movie has some pretty striking images. It comes across on screen as a film that had enough money to do what it wanted, and one where some care was taken with the cinematography. That’s not always true in this genre, and it was appreciated. The entire movie takes place in a picturesque lakeside forest area like the original (with Cape Town, SA standing in for Wesport, CT according to IMDb) and the natural setting is lovingly filmed.

Believe it or not, the 1972 Craven version was inspired by a Bergman film from 1960 called Jungfrukällan. Craven took the storyline about rape, murder and vigilante justice and gave it an updated 70s explotiation flick sheen. He made it significantly more gory, but stuck close to the central ideas of Bergman’s film.

This movie is arguably closer in spirit to the Bergman flick in that less work is put into shocking the viewer and more into examining the psychology. The rape and murder scenes are still there and plenty icky, but they are less horrific than Craven’s version. The emphasis in this film returns to the shift in the raped girl’s parents from depressed yuppies to avengers when their daughter’s assailants unwittingly turn to them for shelter and assistance.

I’m not generally comfortable with vigilantes in film. I don’t like to be forced into the position of rooting for someone doing the wrong thing, especially when they aren’t even shown considering the impact of their choices. It’s become expected in mainstream films that when someone’s family is threatened, the audience will support them in exacting revenge or rescuing their beloved no matter what the cost, to the perpetrators and even to innocent bystanders. I know I’m not in the mainstream on this, but the idea that we’re all above the law when people we love are in trouble indicates a moral immaturity in both the audience and the filmmakers.

This film bypasses that interesting and important dilemma by stacking the deck so that the parents are acting at almost all times both as avengers and in self-defense and thereby misses its chance to mean anything. There is a moment at the end where the father twists the revenge knob (and the suspension of my disbelief) up to 11, but by that point the battle is well over.

I think it’s an interesting premise, but the 2009 remakers don’t appear to know that, and squander the opportunity to address the genre from inside.

I can’t recommend it because in the final analysis because it’s dumb. Not fun dumb, just unexamined dumb. Don’t bother.