The thing about the original 1977 movie, what made it both scary and compelling, was that you never got to know why the car was killing people, it just did it. And they weren't bad people either, they were just ordinary people doing ordinary things, and you were introduced to them as such before the car killed them.
By setting up this film as a conventional revenge-from-the-grave story with stereotypical goth-clown villains and what we're allowed to assume is an AI-controlled car (which doesn't even look intimidating), all of that is lost. When the possibility of a supernatural explanation is introduced mid-way through, it's too late - at that point, the audience rightly sees that car as little more than a means of advancing the ho-hum murder-revenge plot-line. It's not scary enough in itself to take over the movie, like the original car did.
People will say, "it's a low-budget film, so don't have such high expectations," but the original film had a lower budget than this one, even in 1977 dollars, and it's considered a modern horror classic. There were good, creative ideas behind it which this one just doesn't have.
By setting up this film as a conventional revenge-from-the-grave story with stereotypical goth-clown villains and what we're allowed to assume is an AI-controlled car (which doesn't even look intimidating), all of that is lost. When the possibility of a supernatural explanation is introduced mid-way through, it's too late - at that point, the audience rightly sees that car as little more than a means of advancing the ho-hum murder-revenge plot-line. It's not scary enough in itself to take over the movie, like the original car did.
People will say, "it's a low-budget film, so don't have such high expectations," but the original film had a lower budget than this one, even in 1977 dollars, and it's considered a modern horror classic. There were good, creative ideas behind it which this one just doesn't have.