The Hills Have Eyes

(Alexandre Aja/2006/USA)

This remake of the Wes Craven 1977 cult horror relocates the story from Nevada to old nuclear testing sites in the New Mexico desert. Miners who refused to leave the site have become mutated cannibals attacking anyone who strays into their territory. This is the first misstep for me. The beauty of the original, if such a word can be applied to it, was that the savage cannibals were spawned from the depravity of one man, who seems to have been evil incarnate since birth and thus far more open to interpretation when trying to apply meaning or allegory to the story. By defining the story as government tests nasty nuclear bombs and creates family of deranged flesh eaters their spectrum of motivation narrows. Many people saw Craven’s film as a parable of class war in America, the poor versus the well off and the savagery the depth of animosity between the two could produce. But here the cannibals are just hard done by miners at best living out a grudge against an uncaring government by attacking wider society without any of the subtleties that could be applied to the more open ended original.

 

The second misstep is then allowing the characters of the mutants to be as slight as the cannibals in the original. Wes Craven didn’t need to develop any character arcs in Jupiter’s depraved gang; a simple good versus evil plot was in place. But the back-story in Aja’s version demands more or at least opens up the space for more detail, which is then not delivered. By presenting the miners’ narrative but simultaneously reducing them down to the “bad guys” a vacuum is created which lessens the vitality of this remake for me. Outside of this the 2006 The Hills Have Eyes gets the pacing and full on gore shock about right, so in the end Aja produces a decent update of a classic but misses the essence of what made the classic in the first place. Schlock horror is not high on my list of preferred genres but the purist in me would recommend bypassing this remake and going straight to the source for some 1977 style shock treatment.

(2.5/5)