The Hills Have Eyes

Alexandre Aja, whose previous forgettable horror entry was the French hit Haute Tension, updates Wes Craven's forgettable cannibal freak movie without actually bothering to update anything. Save a few additional bits of gory mayhem and a barely-there sub-plot about nuclear blasts in the New Mexico desert, what you have here is a surprisingly straight-ahead, faithful remake of a movie that was itself fairly generic and unimpressive.

The main appeal of the Craven original is the title, anyway, so why not just take that and a bare-bones story outline and reimagine a completely separate movie? It would certainly provide more freedom than the structure adhered to in Aja's film, which spends at least a half hour replicating the opening of every horror film from the last several years. Say it with me now...

A family on vacation, lost on a desert side road, runs into car trouble and finds themselves stranded. As they nervously attempt to find a way out of their predicament, they are set upon by a family of crazed mutant cannibalistic hill-people who hack several of them to bits and kidnap a baby. Then, in a twist similar in many respects to Craven's film before Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, the surviving family members head into the hills themselves to rescue their loved ones and exact revenge.

Aja adds a tiny bit of backstory to this framework but not nearly enough to set his film apart from either the prior movie or any other entries in the recent glut of retro slasher flicks that rip off the set-up of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the new version, the mutants in the hills are not just inbred but the victims of governmental malfeasance. When the military tested nuclear bombs in these hills, this one family of miners refused to move out and thus suffered the consquences of the radioactive fallout.



As an idea, it's not all that bad. Mainly, it enhances the theme of the original film, the cyclical nature of violence. The vacationing family is a peaceful, suburban sort until they are terrorized, and then they too turn into manaical, plotting, bloodthirsty killers, albeit against their will. Aja has indeed made this idea more explicit - we actually see the violent act that created the film's sociopathic villains - and tries to turn the entire climax into a blunt visual metaphor.

Our characters fight to the death in model homes filled with creepy mannequins. It's an extremely obvious metaphor for the violent rage that lies behind the picture-book image of contemporary American life. Too obvious. The entire sequence comes off kind of silly and overblown, particularly the sidelong visual references to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, a movie that really explores the depths of depravity lurking deep within the seemingly-civilized American male.

But this stuff comes late in the film and never really makes much of an impact. By that point, there's been so much frenetic, over-the-top torment and blood spray, so many children have mourned their butchered bretheren, neither the filmmakers nor the viewer has the patience or energy for motif development.

I mean to say that this is not merely a standard run-of-the-mill gore-filed horror movie, the sort of thing where a director could devote a portion of the movie to an activity that doesn't involve vivisection. We meet the cast, headed up by Kathleen Quinlan and Ted Levine as the parents, with a bunch of unknowns playing their children and X-Men 2 and 3 vet Aaron Stanford (he's Pyro!) as their put-upon son in law, and then Aja basically gives upon even trying to tell a story and just presents his audience with well-filmed sequences of beatings, tortures, rapes and gruesome slayings. The make-up effects, by the KNB team responsible for the Kill Bill movies as well as this year's significantly better and more enjoyable Hostel, are extraordinarily detailed and largely effective. I even liked the designs on the mutant family, who despite being played by a variety of film veterans like Billy Drago and Desmond Askew, aren't given any screen time at all to develop as anything but an unseen meance.

I'm left with the same feeling I had after Haute Tension. Aja's pretty good with a camera. Though I'm starting to get tired of this oversatuated/filtered lens bullcrap, I can't deny that this movie looks pretty cool and has its own kind of frenzied, exuberant style. But these films rely on bloodletting exclusively as entertainment, exclusively, and though I enjoy horror films, I just need a little bit more to maintain my interest. 60 minutes or more of sheer uninterrupted cruelty and I start to get numb to it all.

I think I finally understand this recent obsession with 70's horror remakes and updates. Until now, I had been assuming that the studio executives just liked the famous titles of these old movies - Texas Chainsaw Massacre, say, or The Omen - and figured that even if not everyone remembered the actual movies, they knew they were famously great movies and so an update would have some sort of intrinsic appeal.

But that's not really accurate. The target audience for these films are far too young to even remember the original movies. The original Wes Craven Hills Have Eyes came out the year before I was born, in 1977. I've seen it because I'm a fan of these kinds of films, but the primary demographic at which they're aiming these movies isn't 27 year olds like me. It's 16 year olds who are going to sneak into the theater and then buy the unrated version on DVD. Those kids don't know from Hills Have Eyes. Remaking it gives them a way to produce a film that's already been a success once, so unless it gets royally fucked up the second time around, their investment should pay off. As an added bonus, any old farts who fondly remember the original may be more inclined to come check out the new one than they would to shell out $12 on some unknown horror commodity.

Which means that the entire idea for Aja's film would be to tinker as little as possible with the successful formula of the first film. And on that level, it's Mission Accomplished.