So after saying for a long time that I wasn't going to read these books, I finally caved and read them. I really enjoyed (as much as one can enjoy the slaughter of dozens of teens) the first novel, and even the second novel... but the third I could have lived without. It was a really interesting storyline, I'll definitely give the author that!
As for the movie... I think it was pretty clear that here's this novel about a horrible subject matter and the director of the movie's idea was to get a bunch of attractive people, throw them into the modified plot and hope people didn't notice all of the discrepancies between the movie and the book, or the fact that they were trying to show as little of the violence from the book as possible.
This is one of those movies where it's a good thing I read the book before I went to see it because I think I would have been so confused... but reading the book and knowing what all they'd changed and left out just ticked me off.