The Hills Have Eyes

When did horror movies stop even trying to scare us? The Hills Have Eyes, a remake of a 1970s Wes Craven cheapie horror flick, seems to bend over backwards to splatter its main characters with dust, grime, dirt, and blood head to toe. So what, I ask? We can pretty much see the same stuff when we turn on the TV and watch Fear Factor. What The Hills Have Eyes fails to do is create any form of tension, suspense, or even remotely scare us. Co-writer and director Alexandre Aja (High Tension) knows how to set up potentially frightening scenes, but then does absolutely nothing with them. Compared to other recent horror remakes, the film is far from bad, but it only induced yawns from me instead of the intended frights and quickened heartbeat.

The film begins as many horror movies - with a bunch of people who do the wrong thing because they trust someone they obviously shouldn't have trusted in the first place. The people in question are the Carter family. There's father Bob (Ted Levine), his wife Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan), teenage children Bobby (Dan Byrd) and Brenda (Emilie de Raven), adult daughter Lynne (Vinessa Shaw), Lynne's husband Doug (Aaron Stanford), and Lynne and Doug's baby Catherine. They're driving cross country to California, and are currently lost in the desert after Bob insisted they take a detour and see the sights. They pull into a scuzzy, run down gas station (mistake # 1), and unwisely decide to take directions from the one guy who works there (mistake # 2). The guy looks like he hasn't bathed since the Y2K problem was discovered to be not such a big deal after all, and has never heard of dental hygiene. Regardless, they trust him, and follow his directions to a "short cut" back to civilization.

Of course, the path turns out to be anything but what they expect. Not only do they immediately come across a set trap that kills their tires, they are unknowingly being watched by hideous, cannibalistic freaks of nature that have been mutated after U.S. nuclear tests were performed in the desert decades ago, and have been attacking unsuspecting families traveling through the desert for years. When these "creatures" attack the Carters, most are raped or killed, and the few remaining survivors must band together to not only get out of the trap alive, but to also track down baby Catherine, whom the mutants have taken back to their hideout for reasons unknown.

The Hills Have Eyes is pretty standard stuff as far as horror films go, and should hold few surprises for anyone with even a passing familiarity of the genre. You can pretty much pinpoint who's going to live to see the end credits almost the second they walk onto the screen. (Except for one survivor that came as somewhat of a surprise to me.) There's certainly nothing wrong with staying true to traditions, and for a little while, the film works. It's got an appropriately gritty and sun-baked look that gives the audience a sense of sweltering heat. The opening half is also somewhat creepy in that we can hear the people watching the Carters from afar, but cannot see them. We hear their moans and groans, and are watching the Carters from their point of view. It's effective, and gets the audience excited. Sure, the first half kind of relies a little too much on cheap jump scares (people suddenly throwing themselves against the window of the car for no reason whatsoever), but for the most part, the movie does a good job at hinting that something suitably creepy is about to take place.

Then we finally get to see the family's hidden tormentors, and all that tension flies out the window when we see that they look like a cross between Sloth, the kind-hearted deformed man-child from The Goonies, and rejects from the casting call for a remake of Deliverance. They're just not very scary looking, and no matter how often they glare at the camera or clumsily paw at the female members of the Carter clan, they did not create any feelings of terror or fear. I actually couldn't stop thinking about that character from The Goonies whenever they came up on the screen, and I kept on silently laughing to myself. This is not the feeling that I think Mr. Aja was shooting for. Regardless, the mutants show up, they do some damage, then they run off. The remainder of the film deals with the survivor's fight to escape, which would be interesting if the movie could think of something interesting to happen. After the attack, the movie seems to just meander along, not really going anywhere. One of the survivors goes off with the dog to look for the missing baby, while the others literally do nothing but cry and set up traps around their vehicle in case the mutants come back. Nothing happens for so long that we quickly find ourselves losing interest. The movie does try to creep us out again when one of the survivors comes across an abandoned town that was used in the nuclear tests, but once again, the movie shoots itself in the foot because so little happens. And when something does happen, the dog is usually the one to solve the problem. It almost starts to resemble some kind of twisted episode of Lassie. ("What is it girl? Grandpa Joe is being attacked by cannibal mutants? Well, go maul 'em!")

Aside from being disappointingly dull, it's hard to root for the Carters because, like so many other horror films, the movie doesn't care about them. They spend the entire first half of the movie bickering and/or complaining, especially the character who eventually turns out to be the one we're supposed to root for at the end. The character's shift from whiner to superhuman who can still fight after getting body parts chopped off, his head bashed in repeatedly, and shot at is quite hard to swallow. Perhaps what makes it harder to accept this person as being the hero is that earlier in the film, the character steals from cars of past victims that have been dumped in the middle of the desert by the mutant clan. Okay, let me ask you something. If you came across a giant pit in the middle of the desert filled with blood-stained cars, would you start looting stuff like teddy bears and fishing poles from within them, and then take them back to your family? The film also becomes way too reliant on coincidences and impossibilities that the entire film just collapses on the already shaky foundation that it was built on.

Maybe a rewrite or two could have fixed things, because this is a well done movie in just about every other aspect. Even if the characters are a bit thin for their own good, the actors do give it their all, and are at least able to give very emotional and honest performances, perhaps more so than the material deserves. The music score is tense without being overbearing, and like I said, the film is good at setting up the horror. It's only when the horror finally reveals itself that the movie starts to lose its way and turns into a tedious and slow-paced slog. It's frustrating, because we see the movie keeps on stacking up potentially memorable moments (such as a sequence where a character finds himself locked in a giant broken down freezer filled with bloody corpses) only to do nothing with them. It also would have been nice if we find out more about the evil mutant clan. It certainly would have helped explain why one of them decides to turn against them at one point.

The Hills Have Eyes is not a terrible film, and is a much stronger effort than Aja's High Tension. (This movie thankfully leaves out the wacko twist ending that all but killed Tension.) It just could have been and should have been so much than what's up on the screen. All the right stuff is there. I don't know, maybe something got lost when the film was edited from a NC-17 to an R, and we'll have to wait for the unrated DVD to get the full film. Die-hard gore fans are sure to have fun, though, as they'll get plenty of splatter for their buck. Anyone else who wants a little bit more from their horror will just have to keep on waiting.

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