Very shortly, our boogieman shows his knife-yielding intentions, and Jim gets out of a chilling jam, but he doesn’t lose the man. Our stranger makes a game of putting dead bodies in their path while implicating them in the murders he commits along their route. The couple falls into panic zone, behaving in the most suspicious way possible, while their tormentor displays an uncanny ability to sniff out their hiding spots.

Music video director Dave Meyer, working from a re-written version of that 1986 script (by Eric Red), repeats the original film's infamous tractor-trailer stunt, but adds a few shocks, and makes the violence as graphic as can be. And Sean Bean, as Rutger Hauer did 20 years ago, makes this free-range psychopath more interesting than he deserves to be. While Hauer is truly missed, Bean is fine as the stock villain. The problem is he's not given much of motive, and the audience has even fewer reasons to care about the fate of his victims.

Director Meyers uses some energetic wide-angle shots of the bleak Texas countryside to keep the dread building exponentially, perhaps to make up for the lack of quality dialogue. Watch out for his pop culture move wherein Grace is watching Hitchcock’s “The Birds” in a hotel room; an in-joke, as producer Michael Bay is unleashing his “Birds” remake in '09.