Take that, Freddy Krueger.

It’s one reason ‘Kidnapped’ packs such a visceral impact – at first. The Spanish import, which screened at the Mile High Horror Film Festival Oct. 8 but will be available Nov. 29 on DVD,  uses a naked sense of reality to bring us up close to a homeowner’s worst nightmare – the home invasion.

The victims here aren’t heroic or even remotely competent in their own defense. It’s a miracle they survive the film’s first few moments given their boneheaded attempts to save themselves.

An affluent Madrid couple and their headstrong teenage daughter are settling into their new home as the story opens. Their biggest worry is whether young Isa (Manuela Velles) will spend her first night in the home with her parents or out partying with friends.

A trio of masked intruders smash into the house before the minor crisis can be resolved. The men subdue the family members and force them to give up their credit and ATM cards as well as the respective pass codes. No one will get hurt as long as they do everything as told, the intruders warn. While one of the masked men takes the father (Fernando Cayo) out to wring every last penny out of those ATM cards, the other two keep an eye on mother and daughter to make sure they don’t try anything funny.

The poor family’s attempts to thwart the intruders is nearly comic, from pathetic escape attempts to a botched plan to ask a stranger at the ATM for help.

‘Kidnapped’ hardly boasts an original premise. The past few years gave us similar storylines in ‘The Strangers’ and ‘Funny Games,’ But this home invasion yarn is told with an assured sense of pacing and panic. Director Miguel Angel Vivas sets up the family dynamic with a few measured strokes.

The family members still address each other as “dear” and “darling” even when their lives are being threatened. It’s a humble gesture, but one that goes far in illustrating the tight bond between them.

What a shame, then, that the character development essentially begins and ends with those snippets of devotion.  We have to wait until the final act before we get to know the intruders on even a primitive level, and the victims also reach the final scenes without much shading.

Are the intruders as vicious as they appear? Why was this family selected? The questions aren’t answered to our satisfaction, so when the screws tighten during the final confrontation we’re too detached to care.

Velles does make a bid for some sort of horror movie trophy with her performance. It’s reasonable to think a teen like Isa would be traumatized by the events in the film. But Velles turns that natural reaction into a scenery gnawing adventure that invites mockery, not pity.

The film’s finale is dark, for sure, and more hospitable horror fans may embrace it for these sudden, shocking moments. But the ending feels like a transparent ploy for genre gravitas.

The opening scene in ‘Kidnapped’ turns out to be its best. An unconscious man wakes up in the woods, his hands bound and a bag tied around his head. His connection to the main story isn’t readily apparent, but it’s a perfect way to establish the tone and terrors to come. We don’t know who he is or how he got into this predicament.

What’s missing in the rest of ‘Kidnapped’ is a similar sense of the unknown. This won’t be the last home invasion thriller we see, but let’s hope the next one builds on the can’t-miss premise more effectively than ‘Kidnapped.’

North Korea has taken two American journalists prisoner and charged them with committing “hostile acts” against the regime.

Countries like North Korea, which are the pinnacle of tyranny in the modern world, commit atrocities all the time. What they don’t do is challenge America directly – unless they perceive weakness. The consequence of having a weak president in office is that countries like North Korea are more apt to challenge our resolve. There is no question that by his actions in the last few weeks, taping a message for Iran which legitimized the Islamic government, sending Secretary of State Clinton to Russia with a mislabeled ‘reset’ button, and sending Clinton to Mexico where she blamed the United States for Mexican drug violence, Barack Obama has emboldened all of America’s enemies and emboldened North Korea in this particular case.

It is obvious that the captured journalists are being used as political pawns by the Stalinist regime and it is obvious what Barack Obama will grant them for the journalists’ safe return. Recently two events regarding North Korean foreign policy have occurred. First, the six party talks to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear program have broken down after years of stalling and delay tactics. Second, North Korea has a ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States, sitting on a launch pad. The North is claiming they are launching a satellite with the missile but the capabilities of the missile are obvious for the Korean’s long term goal, which is to carry a payload the size and weight of a nuclear warhead.

The game the Korean’s are about to play is painfully obvious. They are going to promise to commute the sentences of the American journalists, who will surely be convicted in a show trial, as a sign of goodwill – if America agrees to back off trying to stop the missile launch and stop sanctions against North Korea for pursuing their nuclear program.

The fact that American citizens must be aware of, and take responsibility for, is that if we had elected a strong president who was resolute in his foreign policy experience and decision making, the North Koreans would never have tried to pull this stunt.

There are good reasons for enemies of America to fear our president’s potential use of force. It is obvious that the Koreans have observed enough of Barack Obama’s conduct that they have concluded they have nothing to fear from him. Because of this, the Koreans will get their cake and eat it too and this is all made possible because our leaders don’t want to seem insensitive to the suffering of the journalists whose promised return will be conditioned on our inaction against North Korea.

It is fine and good on the surface to have a president in the White House that the citizens of the world love and think highly of. It is not good to have a world, emboldened by this love, take advantage of Barack Obama’s weakness.