The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Directed by Alexandre Aja
Based on Wes Craven's 1977 suspenseful cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes is the story of a family road trip that goes terrifyingly awry when the travelers become stranded in a government atomic zone. Miles from nowhere, the Carter family soon realizes the seemingly uninhabited wasteland is actually the breeding ground of a blood-thirsty mutant family...and they are the prey.
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Having made his mark with The Last House on the Left, such as it was, by turning Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring into ultra-sleazy and ridiculously amateurish drive-in horror, it took Craven five years to come up with Hills, which was essentially Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs set in the desert with inbred mutants standing in for inhospitable British rubes.
Like Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs," in which meek, bespectacled Dustin Hoffman resorts to his base instincts to repel the British thugs invading his home, Stanford's Doug becomes the vessel for the viewer to work out dormant aggression.
Doug works for a cell phone company and he increasingly resembles the ineffectual character that Dustin Hoffman played in Sam Peckinpah’s "Straw Dogs."
I suppose that may be making light of their violent and thoroughly disgusting predilections, and when Aja steps into Straw Dogs territory the film turns unreasonably nasty, but these aren’t the nameless monsters of the ‘70s.
Just as the recent remake of House Of Wax somehow segued into Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory, Aja seems at some point to have lost interest in remaking Hills, since his movie eventually morphs into a retread of Straw Dogs, with Stanford tackling the Dustin Hoffman role of the nebbishy man of peace forced by circumstances to become a man of violence.
Its notion of tribal viciousness is well developed (marked by some interesting thematic nods to Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs), and the other threads are reasonably effective, but by stating its message so openly, the film loses some of the unconscious subversion that defined the original.
About halfway through Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, I was convinced that the film's tag line, "The lucky ones die first," must be referring to the viewers of this entrails-festooned entry in the Inbred Hillbilly Cannibal sub-sub-genre.
My money is on the 70's, which saw the release of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original The Hills Have Eyes, and of course John Boorman's Deliverance.
Catching the current wave of slick, Hollywood remakes of 1970s B-horror hits, Alexandre Aja has updated Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes," adding a few contemporary twists and pumping up the gore factor.
Heck, Craven's overpraised original itself was a rip-off of Tobe Hooper's superior "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
But despite these shortcomings, this is the most satisfying horror remake since Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and like that film, it fills in some blanks the previous film did not.
"The Hills Have Eyes," a brilliantly reimagined version of Wes Craven's 1977 micro-budget horror classic, is unrelenting in its brutality and contains imagery as disturbing as anything seen on mainstream movie screens since "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974).
Ce dernier reprend d’ailleurs quelques éléments du remake somme toute respectable de The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
True enough, this remake is less repellent and more coherent than Aja's previous film, High Tension (or, to give it its full measure of Gallic goredom, Haute Tension).
Unlike other modern filmmakers trying to exploit remakes of bygone horror flicks, French director Alexandre Aja ("High Tension") understands that this type of movie is far more intense if it doesn't look like an MTV video.
As some faithful readers may recall, director Alexandre Aja’s big studio feature film debut, 2003’s High Tension, had me bug-eyed for several days after the screening.
This new Hills Have Eyes has been scrupulously copied from Craven's original template by hotshot French horror director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, released in the U.S. as High Tension).
Director Alexandre Aja demonstrated some talent for horror filmmaking with HIGH TENSION, although it was ultimately ruined by an atrocious English-language dub and a ridiculous twist that took screenwriting cheating to another level.
The French writer-director Alexandre Aja ("High Tension") and co-writer Grégory Levasseur keep the shocking narrative similar to the original which was meant to be scary stuff, but it's now supported with a big budget and manages to get the monsters better makeup (the original makeup was cheesy and more laughable than scary) and improve on the special effects while making the narrative more topical, political and graphic.
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Aja has come through on his stated intention of making "a realistic survival movie in the tradition of John Boorman's Deliverance" (albeit with the usual cheats of superhuman stealth and apparent teleportational abilities of horror-movie bad guys).
The villains in Craven's Hills were cannibals, but came across more as deranged inbreds similar to the ones in Deliverance.
Having made his mark with The Last House on the Left, such as it was, by turning Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring into ultra-sleazy and ridiculously amateurish drive-in horror, it took Craven five years to come up with Hills, which was essentially Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs set in the desert with inbred mutants standing in for inhospitable British rubes.
With his inspiration firmly rooted in the no-budget beginnings of the genre ("Blood Feast," "Night of the Living Dead," Craven's own "Last House on the Left" and, especially, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), Aja has managed to imbue his film with a feeling, if not a look, of impoverished cruddiness that harks back to the heyday of the z-movie grind houses in which it once flourished.
But he’s also responsible for his fair share of turkeys, Deadly Friend and Cursed being among the most widely reviled.
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The unusual-looking, chrome-domed Michael Berryman, a patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, portrayed one of the murderous inbreds and his face was front and center on the film's poster and print display ads.
Cheekily appalled by this misbegotten figure of stranded goodness, my brother leaned over in the theater and asked, "Wasn't she in Schindler's List?", but then The Hills Have Eyes is so thematically bonkers and so sticky-fingered in its regard for other movies that I can easily imagine the parallel being deliberate.