THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006)

 

(Director/co-screenwriter: Alexandre Aja. Co-screenwriter: Grégory Levasseur, billed as Gregory Levasseur.)

Plot: A vacationing family, lost in a desert, are hunted by mutants.

 

Review

Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 shocker is a slicker, less raw, more-tightly scripted film. The savagery─malicious violence, rape and killing is still in-your-face and gory, and the underpinnings of national unease are still there. Also: this remake shows more of the nuclear test town and the automotive graveyard; and the remake is more overt in its political-divide commentary, e.g., Big Bob and Doug’s Right Wing/Left Wing exchanges are explicit in their political barbs—Ted Levine (THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, 1991) and Kathleen Quinlan, as ex-cop Big Bob and his ex-hippie wife, Ethel, represent Red State thinking; their daughter, Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) and her husband (Doug, played by Aaron Stanford) represent Blue State leanings. Lynn’s siblings, Bobby (Dan Byrd) and Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) aren’t solidly political yet. And of particular interest to the cannibals there’s Lynn and Doug’s baby.

Like Craven’s original film, inspired by Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), there’s a steady build-up of small-but-unsettling events that, midway through the film, become more overt, terrifying and deadly.

Veteran actor Tom Bower is great as the “Gas Station Attendant”─ Bower, in this excellent cast, stands out in what might be one of the most rewarding roles in HILLS, as a man struggling with his conscience.

The mutant cast: Michael Bailey Smith (Pluto); Robert Joy (the lecherous Lizard); Laura Ortiz (Ruby); Ezra Buzzington (Goggle); Greg Nicotero, HILLS’s special makeup effects designer, played Cyst; and cold-gazed Billy Drago (THE UNTOUCHABLES, 1987) as the family patriarch, Papa Jupiter.

“Remake” is understandably a bad word in many movie-goers mouths, but this second-time-around take on HILLS is a well-made, timely flick worth watching if you’re not an originals-only purist, and willing to judge the 2006 version on its own merits.