Hills Have Eyes, The

dir: Alexandre Aja
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Ah, the art of the pointless remake. Why not endlessly repeat the actions of others? Maybe I should invent the light bulb again, or write, direct and star in a film called Citizen Kane. Tell me you don’t get a tingle in a bad place over the idea.

Since everything else is being remade and redone, why not remake Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes from the 70s? Craven also produced this remake, meaning he couldn’t be bothered directing it himself (how many directors remake their own films anyway?), but is more than happy to collect the fat pay-check from this renovated cinema nasty.

They hired French horror director Alexandre Aja to helm this little slice of viciousness, whose previous work Haute Tension proved, if nothing else, that he can construct a very nasty death scene. Sure, so High Tension, as us non-Francophones would know it, had the laziest plot twist imaginable, and little going for it except extreme gore, but it certainly delivered as a macabre horror film should. It also looked a treat as well.

Here, I’m sure, he had about 15 times the budget, but also a bunch of other constraints placed upon him by a studio system that demands results in the form of big box office numbers. So, whilst he clearly had free reign on gore, mutilations and the number of people that die, something is still profoundly lacking in terms of raising this creation above the ranks of crap like the Texas Chainsaw remake, House of Wax and Rob Zombie’s dumb virtual remakes of 70s horror flicks.

The original Hills, along with Last House on the Left, made Wes Craven a Colossus who bestrode the world of horror films for a decade before the Elm Street films, and almost makes up for all the other crap he’s been responsible for since then. Hills and the current remake share the same premise: wholesome American family terrorised by mutant hillbillies, but they diverge significantly in their realisation.

Not that I’m saying the old Hills is great and should never have been remade. But though the new version maintains a creepy feel for most of its duration, and uses a weird synthesiser-type score to recall the earlier era of horror films (and uses sound in an excellent fashion), something was still lacking for me. The moments of extreme violence did little to jag me out of the boredom that set in during the first hour or so.

The original also, apparently (unless it’s something Craven has made up after the fact to make himself seem more profound), had something slightly more meaningful to say. The family itself, though being the ‘good’ guys, become, in that environment, as cruel and sadistic as their enemies, showing how they become tainted over the course of their ordeal.

In 2006, the enemies are sub-human morons who feast on human flesh, and the measures taken by the victims to get their revenge are accompanied by triumphant, almost “Behold the Conqueror” kind of music. One of the mutants even gets killed with an American flag. I’m not kidding. It’s probably supposed to be ironic, but really, big freaking deal.

The mutants are the multi-generational product of nuclear explosions in the New Mexico desert. Despite having been asked nicely to move on, a group of miners living and working in the area choose not to move when the government begins atomic testing. Despite the fact that it’s their own idiotic fault for staying, the mutants, who are hideously deformed and cannibalistic, blame normal people for their woes. As such, they consume anyone that comes their way in this mysterious section of the New Mexico desert that has no cellphone coverage or tooth paste deliveries.

The family is made up of the right wing ex-police detective (Ted Levine), his wife, two daughters and gun-toting son, and his Jewish, Democrat-voting son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford), who hates guns and just wants the patriarch Big Bob to respect him. Doug and his wife Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) also have a baby, just to up the stakes.

Doug even wears glasses. Glasses are a great cue in movies. In practically every culture on this planet that has movie cameras, putting glasses on a male character is shorthand for saying they are either intellectuals, wimpy, or both. But beyond that, the glasses are also a piss-weak visual clue that Doug is going to transform into the character Dustin Hoffman plays in Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.

Even people who haven’t seen Straw Dogs would know the classic image of a straight-on photo of Hoffman’s face with the glasses emphasised, with one of the lenses cracked, as if to highlight how the protagonist gets a bit cracked in the head during the course of the flick. I don’t think it’s accidental that they included it in this film.

As for the actor playing Doug, the only thing I remember seeing Aaron Stanford in was X Men 2, as the mutant Pyro, who plays with fire and gets seduced by Sir Ian McKellan and his naughty ways. He does okay, but it’s not exactly a role that stretches one’s acting abilities, though all that corn syrup substituting for blood can’t be good for his skin. He spends the latter part of the film covered pretty much head to toe in the stuff.

He is The One who must Protect the American Family, Save his Baby Girl from the Hungry Mutants, and Bring Vengeance Upon the Mutated Heads of the Villains.

And what an ugly bunch of rapists, murderers and cannibals they are. To say they lack characterisation is an understatement. I generally couldn’t differentiate most of them from each other, except when their mutation was extreme enough. They have names like Big Brain, Pluto, Lizard and Ruby, as far as I can remember, but they’re about as distinctive, except for the one that looks like an evil version of Gandalf, as the hillbillies in Deliverance. But Deliverance doesn’t suffer from having a lack of characterisation for the bad guys, and neither should Hills. In theory.

In theory, democracy works. In theory, Amanda Vanstone and Tony Abbot are human.

I think what put me offside was the build-up of banalities that occurs with the family before the wolves descend upon them. The pre-show entertainment that this usually represents is often perfunctory and cliché in even the better versions of these films, and sometimes seems to go on for longer than it should (a common criticism of Wolf Creek). Done well, it makes us sympathise with the protagonists and barrack for them when the knives come out. Done badly, it makes us cheer for the killers and look forward to the kills.

I didn’t really care about the wholesome family. Obviously, no-one wants the baby to end up on the menu, unless there’s one in the audience with you, mewling and bawling, but other than that their fates left me with a feeling of cold indifference. Doug as a protagonist was all right, I guess, but I never really believed the whole unlikely and implausible scenario. I suspended my disbelief as much as humanly possible, but I just didn’t care. Nor did I really care whether the mutants got butchered by film’s end either.

So the acts of defiance, butchery and brutality really washed over me, which is not to say they’d have the same lack of impact on other audience members. There are people ripped apart by dogs, dogs disembowelled, fingers cut off with axes, picks through the eyeball, people feasting on corpses, people burned and shot to death, an implied rape, a person waking up in a container full of blood and corpse parts, and a guy’s head blown away into a spaghetti bolognaise sauce, but really, it’s all a bit silly.

About the only scene that I found disturbing involved a mutant putting his mutated hand on the face of one of the daughters, and keeping it there, whilst giggling a demented giggle. Also, there’s a bit of breastfeeding that’s worse than anything else in the entire film.

I never felt like any of it mattered, but I imagine the film could have a profoundly different impact on someone else. Without the right atmosphere, without the right tone, this stuff looks about as convincing as a drag queen’s push-up bra.

And, in case it made a packet at the box office, it’s clearly implied that there’s going to be a sequel. Oh joy. Radioactive mutants are going to be the new zombies. Double joy.

It’s pointless. It’s not even as good as the Texas Chainsaw remake. Make of that what you will.

The Hills may indeed have Eyes, but maybe they needed a bit more balls instead.

6 times I wished I was in the deserts of New Mexico myself instead of watching this flick out of 10

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“Bobby, leave Doug alone. He's a Democrat. He doesn't believe in guns.” – searing political commentary, The Hills Have Eyes.

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