Wes Craven's original The Hills Have Eyes,\ which was itself practically a remake of his own 1972 jolter ""Last House on the Left,"" was an ultra low-budget, exploitative look at man's inherent capacity for violence. Both films, which were also influenced by Ingmar Bergman's ""The Virgin Spring,"" had likeable, innocent Americans being tortured and senselessly killed by antagonists representing evil in its purest form so that other likeable, innocent Americans could guiltlessly embrace their capability for violence and slay those godless sons-of-bitches.
French director Alexandre Aja's new ""The Hills Have Eyes"" alters little of its source material—we've got the chatty Mom (Kathleen Quinlan), the gruff papa (former Buffalo Bill Ted Levine), the teenaged girl (Emilie de Ravin of ""Lost"" minus the accent), the teenaged boy (Dan Byrd), the oldest daughter (Vinessa Shaw), her baby and her somewhat wimpy husband (Aaron Stanford) all in a motor home bound for California. After inexplicably taking advice from a sketchy gas station attendant, the clan makes a detour through the desolate Nevada desert. But, as we all know, this is ravenous mutant country, and after crashing the RV, the stranded family must eventually fend off those vicious hill dwellers.
The mutants are certainly hideous and nasty, as they are the hideous descendants of miners who became deformed from government nuclear testing, and their hobbies include rape, cannibalism and waving guns at babies. To Aja's credit, he keeps the death toll unpredictable, and we never really know who is going to get savagely slaughtered next. Some of the exceedingly gross set-pieces are reminiscent of Aja's previous French film, ""High Tension"" (or, if you prefer, its hipper European title, ""Switchblade Romance""), especially considering their abundance of cranial trauma. But whereas Aja's penchant for nonsensical third acts is present, his pitch-black humor is absent in ""The Hills Have Eyes,"" and as a result the majority of the carnage comes across as joyless.
""The Hills Have Eyes"" reveals itself to be a lazy mishmash of ideas, many of
which have been cribbed from films like Sam Peckinpah's ""Straw Dogs"" and David Cronenberg's ""A History of Violence."" Aja at times seems to be echoing the sentiments of those auteurs, but then his reliance on disgusting makeup and crowd-pleasing bloodshed negates any half-assed attempts at social commentary. The wimpy husband character, while skillfully acted by Stanford (who, after playing Iceman in ""X2,"" proves himself a capable chameleon), is meant to undergo a transformation from gun-abhorring liberal to ax-wielding Rambo venturing into mutant territory, but Aja more or less presents him as one extreme or the other to suit the faulty plot. The same goes for other characters, especially the teenagers, and Aja even goes so far as to deposit wholesale scenes from Craven's original without much context or logic in relation to his various updates.
Aja has a real problem with following through, and once he can learn how to marry outlandish gore with a coherent story beginning to end, he may direct a great horror film. ""The Hills Have Eyes"" is a disappointing horrorshow that tries to masquerade as a socially conscious remake but ends up a stolid rehash of every other American revenge movie cliché. Even though the update is faster paced and dressed up with buckets of blood, Craven's comparably restrained original is still the superior film.
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