I prefer the original, but this does improve on it in a couple regards.

First of all, the original film kind of feels like three different movies put together. There's the excellent opening with the babysitter, a long middle section featuring the killer stalking some other random woman, and then a pretty good conclusion with the killer tracking down the original babysitter years later. This film takes the best part of the original movie (the opening 20ish minutes) and makes that the entire focus of the movie.

The second issue that the original has is that it reveals too much about the killer. He's pretty terrifying in the opening scene, but then in the middle portion, we find out that he's basically a sad, pathetic loser... who happens to be prone to psychotic tendencies. And while I guess it is kind of scary to think that some random beggar you're passing on the street could be an escaped child murderer, I think it still stands that the killer was much scarier the less we saw and knew of him.

Of course I would still like to state for the record that I do think that the opening 20 minutes of the original is better than this movie, partially because I'm biased towards Carl Kane as Jill Johnson, but mostly because the original sequence of events was kept much tighter and more suspenseful. That isn't to say that this movie didn't have suspense, but the original sequence didn't have time to afford with multiple false alarms and jump scares. It had to get straight to the point right away. Because this movie was taking a 20 minute sequence and expanding it to be a full length movie, it did have to reach into the box of cliches to reach the needed running time.

Also I would say that the original benefited from being allowed to be darker with it's material. While it was a little disappointing that the original showed to much of it's killer, it still doesn't change the fact that he murdered the two children Jill was babysitting, with his own bear hands no less, before she had even arrived and was waiting for her -covered in children's blood- to come up to check on them so that he could kill her too. That's a much darker, more disturbing outcome than what happened in this movie.



Gruss Vom Krampus!