Half good, half horrible John Carpenter makes a movie that plays homage to his previous movies. In this scenario all the bad acting, bad script, and bad sets in the world won't matter. We fans appreciate this and watch carefully for the next insider moment. There are some nice settings that make one think of Hellraiser and raise the nervous energy a bit, a very quick moment of Evil Dead 2, a huge helping of The Thing, visual references to The Fog and Prince of Darkness, nods to Halloween, and a touch of Escape from New York.
Unfortunately this is only the first half of the movie.
The second half turns into a mess of a flick, where pawns who can't see more than one move ahead in this game make poor decisions and act on Hollywood-esque whims (mouth-mashing with people you hate, wearing skimpy clothes, acting like a moron because of drugs, breaking into groups, deriding the advice of others, unexplainable actions to further the plot...) The end is capped with a "good God, don't do it...don't do it...awww, you did it" exchange of scenes and dialog.
At least the music, as always, has kept up with the times. Some excellent mixes of electronic and metal...although it makes me wonder how many hours the music director spent playing Quake2 before working on this film.
Nutshell: If you are a John Carpenter fan, watch the first 50 minutes, then go do something else, like clean the rim of your toilet. Otherwise you will likely wonder how something so campily set-up could degrade so quickly into a film where one-liners are queen, horrid explosions where the victims makes running motions as they fly through the air is king, and no previous content is used, referenced, or explained.
Well, maybe catch the last two minutes. What happens is a prime example of the worst script writing in years!