So I've been meaning to check this one out for a while, but I never got around to it last night until they showed it on late night TV. Overall, I wasn't all that disappointed, but mostly because I wasn't really expecting anything great.

The idea of this movie is quite cool, a young couple is terrorised by a trio of maniacs simply because they happened to be home. That idea I like. It reminded me a bit of Duel, the Steven Spielberg movie, which operates on a similar notion. A man in a car is terrorised by a guy in a massive truck for no other reason that he happened to overtake the truck driver. It becomes a deadly game of cat-and-mouse filled with Hitchcockian suspense and some great driving sequences. I was hoping this movie would have something like that going for it, but it took a cool idea and turned it into the most obvious and least imaginative film that could've been made from the idea.

I have a theory about horror films, that they should actually be horrific. Something like The Exorcist or the original Halloween were actually horrific movies, even smething like Salo or Martyrs has the same effect, though for a different reason. Every day in the world we go out, we go to work or to school, we see our friends, go out with our girlfriends/boyfriends, we do what normal people do and we are relatively confident that we are safe and that nothing will happen to us. There's usually a very small, nagging suspicion that we're not going to be, but by a large most days, in most places, we are safe. A great horror film preys on this suspicion and turns it into full-blown paranoia. A great horror film should make us reconsider just how safe we are in this world, how safe we are in our own skins. It should take that feeling of being safe and secure and, for a little while at least, make it seem ridiculous that in such an unpredictable, ugly world that we could ever be safe. This movie didn't do that. When I went to sleep after watching this movie, I wasn't any more afraid of this actually happening to me than I would've been had I not seen it. And that was disappointing.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are also pretty unconvincing as a married couple. There are no sparks or sense of actual love between them. And by the time the film ends they're both pretty much playing one note, and it's completely flat. Neither of them seemed to be particularly bothered by being stabbed. Frankly, Liv Tyler seemed more frightened when she was crawling through the grass and running. If it were me, I would be less scared of being hunted and more scared of being gutted. But that's just me. Also the writing in Liv Tyler's character is pretty weak (a common and unfortunate problem among male writers). You can tell this movie was made by a man because it's Speedman who gets not only scared but also pissed off that this is happening to him, whereas Tyler is just the scared, helpless damsel from beginning to end. Guarenteed if Sofia Coppola or Rose Troche had made this movie, she would've had a lot more to do than just scream or cry. I'm getting pretty tired of women being treated so shabbily in movies, even if it's only subtle, as in this one.

Like I said the main problem with this is that it doesn't seem like this writer/director was really trying all that much. He took a great idea and made it into an okay movie. He took the most conventional route he could've taken with a pretty unconventional idea and it's a pity. Because this movie could have been truly frightening. As it is, it's just a pretty okay thriller. Some nice ideas, some scary moments. But nothing special.

Sorry for dragging up an old thread. But I thought I may as well throw in my piece.