This remake is about as unpleasant and unrelenting as the original and retains much of the feel of Wes Craven's feature debut. It is brutal. A few more characters are added, including the son of one of the nasty killers. This makes the movie more of a comparison of the two different family dynamics going on.
The premise is that a vicious killer named Krug (Garret Dillahunt of SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) escapes being taken to prison. His brother and girlfriend ram the police car he's being transported in and kill the two cops. They then take off. Then we go to the "All American" family who are taking a trip to their vacation home on the lake. The husband is a doctor, the wife a teacher and they have a seventeen-year old daughter.
But the lake visit may not be a good idea because they are all haunted by the unexpected death of their teenaged son. The daughter borrows the car in order to see a friend in the area. They meet a boy around their own age and he takes them back to his motel room to smoke some weed. We then learn that his father is Krug and that the girls are really at the wrong place at the wrong time.
When a group of people come knocking on their door during a storm, saying that their
car broke down, the professional couple is more than willing to help. Then they find out what these guys did to their daughter and proceed to get some revenge.
However, the final scene where they get their vengeance on Krug is goofy and out of left field. It just doesn't work, no matter how gory the effects are. I much prefer that key scene from the original, which is the scene everyone ultimately remembers from that movie.