American faces a serious problem in Alexandre Aja’s jittery remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Faced with the prospect of losing their land due to government meddling, the miners of Godforsakenville™ in the middle of the New Mexico desert have decided to stand their ground and not leave when the government uses their area to test nuclear weapons. Perhaps the government would have been wise to actually use the residents as targets seeing that they eventually mutate into super-strong, super-horny and (sometimes) super-irritating creatures who feed on the flesh of tourists. This nuclear testing continues for over 40 years and in all that time the mutants breed. Unfortunately for Americans, these are not the soft Ewok-like mutants from comic books that can sometimes be misunderstood creatures with noble hearts. Instead these mutants are gapped-toothed slobber faces who would be lucky if their eyes are on the same latitude. Indeed, The Hills Have Eyes makes a frenzied, but valid argument against mutants every where.
Leaving aside the fact that The Hills Have Eyes is a wildly lopsided anti-rural film, Alexandre Aja has actually managed to craft something that is nasty and sweaty and bloody, and it’s not something audiences get to see in these days of PG13 horror with the freshest faces from Tiger Beat. While not a perfect movie, it does deliver one interesting set-piece after the next, and a surprising performance by Aaron Stanford really adds the movie another level of gravity that it probably doesn’t deserve.
Stanford plays the misbegotten son-in-law in the movie. He’s the kind of guy who struggles with smoking, his northeastern intellectual Judaism and whether or not it’s okay to kill mutants with an axe. Frankly, we all know people who face dilemmas like this every day, and interestingly Stanford faces a hero’s journey in The Hills Have Eyes. His story-line from nebbish pacifist to righteous axe-wielder forms the best parts of the movie. Stanford does an incredible job in the role and he seems to enjoy getting to play such an iconic character. The rest of the characters get mainly one-note characterizations, but none are annoying unless you factor in their questionable decision making faculties.
After the family gets sidelined in the middle of the desert they make the immediate mistake of splitting up and everything goes down-Hills-Have-Eyes from there. The rumor mill indicated that there were some last minute edits in this movie to tone down some of the violence, but if there were cuts made, they are not easily discernible. The Hills Have Eyes is a hardcore horror movie. People meet their end in a variety of grisly ways that will make most audiences squirm uncomfortably and sort of make me wet. The gore ranges from a nice disintegrating shotgun blast to the head to forced captivity inside the most disgusting pantry imaginable. All the gore and violence makes perfect sense in the telling of the tale. There are a couple of moments that really stand out as far as violence is concerned. A scene where a baby is held at gunpoint will surely leave most audiences in a puddle, but its placement directly after a horrifying mutant sexual assault is frighteningly over the top in all the right ways. But all the violence does propel the movie forward setting up a showdown that should leave audiences cheering.
Aja is making a nice name for himself. Last year’s High Tension was a formidable horror movie derailed by one of the most retarded twists in movie history. But even with the story-telling mistake, Tension was a thrilling horror vehicle that wasn’t afraid to drag the audience down a dark psycho-sexual path. Hills is similar in character. And like Tension there are a few questionable moments in the film, but nothing happens that pulls you right out of the movie like his previous effort. Sure most people can buy that the mutants are grotesque and cannibalistic, but seriously, why do they have to be such dicks? The finale of the film, ingeniously set in an irradiated and abandoned suburb, is a well thought out booby trap for the audience.
Overall The Hills Have Eyes is a nice treat for horror fans. The movie is filled with grisly kills and buckets of blood, and it’s not afraid to push a few buttons in the process. Also, what other movie will you see this year that has this level of dog-on-mutant carnage. See this or I will punish you.
