Before the stunned eyes of his son (Spencer Treat Clark), a vicious killer (Garret Dillahunt), his sociopathic babe (Riki Lindhome) and his psycho brother (Aaron Paul) kidnap and assault two nubile teens (Sara Paxton and Martha MacIsaac).

They then kill one (MacIsaac) and rape the other (Paxton) before landing in the vacation home of a doctor (Tony Goldwyn) and his wife (Monica Potter) – who happen to be the raped girl's parents.

"If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back?" runs one tagline for this movie. For starters, I might make them sit through this movie repeatedly with their eyes clamped open, like Alex in "A Clockwork Orange." Its depravity is matched only by its ineptness and bad faith.

The director, Dennis Iliadis, tries to bring a religious agony to several of the murder scenes. He lathers on the dirge-like music (one of the musical numbers on the soundtrack is called "Dirge") and displays the knife entering the first victim with a ritual-like inevitability. The movie satisfies the tribal rites of movie-going morons, all right; it serves up stressed and torn flesh for our delectation. In fact, since Paxton is a swimmer, we get to know her skin quite well before it gets muddied and flayed.

Seeing biker movies riff on art house classics such as "Rashomon" was often humorous and exciting in the 1960s, but Craven's slasher-film take-off on Bergman was repulsive and pretentious, and so is this remake of his take-off. (He's one of the producers on this movie.) Iliadis' flashbacks and camera tricks, and the many parallels screenwriters Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth draw between wildly different violent actions – for example, between a burning by auto cigarette lighter and the good doctor cauterizing his daughter's bullet wound – are like fancy window-dressing on an unspeakably tawdry peep show.

The movie means to be about how violence makes animals out of all of us, including the vengeful parents. Unfortunately, that also includes the audience.