credit: www.impawards.com
Director:
Alexandre Aja
Cast:
Aaron Stanford……….Doug Bukowski
Kathleen Quinlan……….Ethel Carter
Vinessa Shaw……….Lynne Bukowski
Emilie de Ravin……….Brenda Carter
Dan Byrd……….Bobby Carter
Robert Joy……….Lizard
Ted Levine……….Bob Carter
Desmond Askew……….Big Brain
Tom Bower/Ezra Buzzington……….Goggle
Maisie Camilleri Preziosi……….Baby Catherine
Billy Drago……….Jupiter
Laura Ortiz……….Ruby
Michael Bailey Smith……….Pluto
Anyone else get the feeling that Hollywood has run out of ideas? After suffering through remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Fog, it’s no surprise to see The Hills Have Eyes up on the big screen again. While certainly not Wes Craven’s most popular film, his 1977 horror film about a family trying to survive in the desert against inbred cannibalistic hillbillies has found its niche as a cult horror classic. It’s a movie you either love or hate, and consider me among the converted as I loved the original Hills. With that in mind I absolutely dreaded the remake. Currently making his name known in horror circles is the writer/director Alexandre Aja, who is known for his movie High Tension. Or maybe not well known if you’ve never heard of that movie, which has been heralded by some as a return to the grindhouse style of the 70’s. Personally I have a rabid hate for that particular movie since it was essentially a rip off of a Dean Kootnz book, except with an ending that made the whole movie illogical and took a big crap on the viewing audience. Just my opinion, but because of that I wasn’t looking forward to a movie I loved being re-written and directed by a man who I feel still owes me my time back for watching High Tension.
Still, I had to see how he handled one of my favorite movies. That and the actress who plays Claire in Lost is in the movie and she’s smoking hot.
The original film was based on a family traveling through the country and after stopping at a gas station going off the main road where they run into some vehicular trouble, followed by some cannibal trouble. Essentially the remake sticks very closely to the original film with a few main differences. The remake takes the idea of one nuclear family against another and makes it a bit more literal as one of the families are actually radioactive this time around. Instead of inbred hillbillies looking for their next meal Aja gives us a family of mutant freaks who have descended from a family of miners who used to live in the area until the place was turned into an A-Bomb testing site. These freaks are kind of pissed off about, you know, looking like freaks so they decide to get back at the government who turned them into mutants by eating people who stray into their territory. Or something like that. It never really gets revealed where they get their taste for human flesh, but that’s always secondary for this type of movie anyway. This is the horror genre, if they’re inbred, mutants, or zombies you can pretty much assume that they want to eat you. I don’t even want to know what a psychiatrist would make of horror movies obsession with cannibalism.
Anyhow, that’s where the family comes in. In Aja’s version the gas station attendant has a good deal with the freaks to keep them supplied with tourists in exchange for their jewelry and money, and he keeps his end of the deal by sending our wandering all American dysfunctional family into their lair. Before you can say “Holy shit, who is eating Mom?” these folks find themselves in a world of trouble. Lucky for us trouble is something Alexandre Aja is good at. Like some of Wes Craven’s best films the rest of the movie is about horrifying circumstances that happens to unsuspecting victims and how they rise above and against those circumstances. The movie is about revenge.
Of course in order for a character to want revenge something bad has to happen, and something bad does happen. Many critics seem to be against the gore or violence in this movie so when I saw it I was expecting blood to be gushing everywhere when in fact the movie wasn’t much different than the original 1977 film when it comes to gore. I was talking with another IP columnist about it an he figures that people have become to death without consequence in a horror movie, an I’d have to agree with him to a point. In The Hills Have Eyes every member of the family is a main character and they all impact the audience, and the other characters in the movie with their deaths. Unlike House of 1000 Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects the director doesn’t focus on sadistic torture of the characters, most deaths are quick or sudden. As far as gore is concerned, honestly I thought the original was worse since Craven brought a sort of stark brutal quality to the movie that you will not see in the sequel, since Aja has gone for more stylish cuts and angles than the original movie. Plus there have been a couple of odd additions where it feels as if the director is trying to make a message about American society with haing a pacifist Democrat and an SUV-driving Republican in the family, as well as doing such things as having one of the muties sing the National Anthem and someone even gets an American flag shove right through their neck. However neither this theme or any possible message about the dangers of Nuclear weapons are fully developed so are best (and will be) ignored byanyone watching.
While some might criticize the movie for how harsh the film is during some death scenes it becomes easier to sympathize with the revenge theme. You want these freaks to feel pain. The movie successfully delivers the same horrors and thrills that the original movie had, which is where the movie disappoints me. Honestly, there’s not that much different than the original movie to really spend the money seeing the remake at the theater when you can spend a lot less watching the original at home. Some remakes such as King Kong, or the new Dawn of the Dead have a different style than the original, which makes them worth watching, the best thing that can be said about Aja’s effort is that he didn’t try to water down his subject matter and reproduced it almost faithfully. As much as I enjoyed watching the movie I couldn’t help but wonder what was the point? Still with as much J-Horror that’s invading the theaters it’s nice to see a movie that is unflinching about its material instead of expecting us to be afraid of a creepy kid or a woman with long hair.
I also want to know why the hell can’t a horror movie just end on a good note sometimes? The ‘suprise’ twist at the endings of films like this are annoying.
