Despite thoroughly enjoying Alexandre Aja’s wildly audacious reimaging of Piranha this past Summer, I still look back at his earlier films with disdain. High Tension was a disappointment, Mirrors was just terrible, and his remake of The Hills Have Eyes sits somewhere in the middle. I remember watching it a few months after it first came out, and being fairly underwhelmed. On one hand, it does better for itself than Wes Craven’s original film could have ever hoped to do. But on the other, it just lacks any of the spirit or the intensity that the original had in spades.

As a rather simple explanation, The Hills Have Eyes revolves around two families. One is the good, wholesome Carter family led by Big Bob (Ted Levine), on their way to California with their truck and camper in tow. The other is the family who lived in the deserted hills in the middle of nowhere, mutated almost beyond recognition by radiation from American nuclear test weapons. After the Carters receive some rather terrible directions, they hit a snag and end up mangling their truck. As Bob and his son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford) set out to get help, the rest of the family stays back and sit idly waiting while the mutant family begin to devise their own plans.

In comparing the original and remake side-by-side, the thing that works the best in favor of the remake is the backstory for the mutant family living in the hills. In the original, they just seemed to be a small group of deranged hillbillies who happened to live out in the hills. Here it is a rather large group of individuals who just never left their home town when they were asked to by American nuke testers. The testers dropped their bombs anyway and thus the people began to mutate. Unfortunately, as a result of making this contribution to the remake, Aja and his partner Grégory Levasseur have sacrificed any sort of development they could have with these characters. Instead of having some form of conscious and thinking like Craven’s hillbillies, Aja and Levasseur’s mutants are just monsters. They are evil and sadistic on purpose, not just by chance. They lose any of the terror or intensity they built in the original film right after we find out that they are the reason for the Carters crashing.

But then, purpose is also a problem for the Carter family too. They have no humanistic traits to speak of; they are just the bait to the monsters. Yes, we understand they are like sheep being led to slaughter, but they just do not seem to feel real enough for us to care. No one stands out as a likable character, and no one is developed enough for us to dislike them, either. When members of either family start to die, the audience just cannot fathom the proper way to react. Should we be upset about watching these “good” or “bad” characters bite the dust, or should we be cheering and egging on the bad guys to do away with the good characters faster? Aja and Levasseur just keep feeding the story along, and just do not seem to have any idea what kind of reaction they want to get from what is occurring on screen. In Craven’s film, he managed to ensure the audience had no idea which group to sympathize with. Here, no one seems to care what anyone does.

And of course, the characters are not helped by any of the performances. Levine's Big Bob, the mother Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) and their eldest daughter Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) are completely downplayed throughout their limited screen time, as is Papa Jupiter (the always excellent Billy Drago), who Aja and Levasseur do not bother explaining to the audience to be the leader of the mutants. While they were not exactly big characters in the original (except for Jupiter, who was actually a key part of that film, but is basically worthless in this one), they still had the audience caring for them. Not here. Putting every single ounce of focus on Bobby (Dan Byrd), Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) and Stanford's Doug just does not cut it. This movie was longer than the original, but lacks any of the dialogue or story for the actors to use for their characters. How does that work?

I must concede however that the gruesome makeup and gore shots are fabulous. The continued excellence from wizards Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger is absolutely astounding. From simple blood shots, to the brutal wounds and bruises inflicted upon our cast of characters, all of it is just as bloody and horrific as it should be. They do not skim on any brutality like a PG-13 rated horror film does. They revel in their R-rating, and they totally deliver on that rating's promise. As a result, the heavily discussed sequence inside the trailer half way through the film is for the most part, very well executed and squirm-inducing. The makeup that brings the mutants to life is award worthy on its own. The look and feel of these monsters is absolutely terrifying, and should send shivers down people's spines as they look at these grotesque creations. It is just too bad they border on parody when they are actually doing something on screen.

And while you would not exactly think it from the type of film it is, the cinematography and set direction is very well done.

Perhaps the years since I watched The Hills Have Eyes have softened me up to Aja’s inane and ludicrously stupid character design, but this remake is an all-around fumble. While the mutants make look nightmarish, and the look of the film is fairly terrifying, the script just does not make anything good come out of it. The acting is nothing special, and the story lacks the edge it had in 1977. But hey, it must have been worth something -- an almost unwatchable sequel came out a year later. And it made this film look like a masterpiece.

  -- David Baldwin