The really scary thing about Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes is how well it is made.
There was a time not that long ago when shlock horror films were made on the cheap by hack directors. Not any more.
These days we have Danny Boyle helming the vampire flick, 28 Days Later.
With his French suspense flick High Tension, Aja proved he'd studied more vintage Alfred Hitchcock than American slasher films.
Aja has an uncanny ability to build suspense and tension into genuine shocks. He also has a penchant for blood, gore and mutilation, which he exploits to near nausea in The Hills Have Eyes.
It is an unpleasant, vile exercise in sadism, but undeniably effective.
This is one horror film that delivers on its promise to terrify and repulse.
In slasher films such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and all their imitators, right down to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw and Hostel, the victims are unsavoury people or hormonally charged youths.
In The Hills Have Eyes, the potential victims include a nursing mother, her infant daughter, her husband, parents and younger brother.
This makes the emotional stakes much higher.
The hunters are a clan of mutant cannibals who prey on unsuspecting tourists travelling through their desert.
Special-effects wizards Gregory Nicotero and Howard Berger have created some truly nightmarish freaks, especially Big Brain (Desmond Askew) a kind of human version of the extraterrestrial monster in the Alien movies.
The hideous mutants are the product of America's nuclear testing of the 1950s and decades of inbreeding. They're the human equivalent of the giant ants, scorpions and tarantulas of the sci-fi flicks of the '50s and '60s.
The mutants rely on a service station owner to misdirect travellers into using a short cut that leads to a vehicle graveyard, where they are butchered.
In return for sending them food, the mutants let the terrified manager escape a similar fate.
This backstory about nuclear testing provides The Hills Have Eyes with its creepiest and most effective sequence.
When the young husband (Aaron Stanford) discovers the mutants have stolen his baby, he heads for their lair.
It is one of the towns the army built for nuclear testing but never destroyed, which it peopled with mannequins instead of humans.
That means it is one of those idyllic 50s settings right out of Father Knows Best -- but it hides horrors beyond the imagination.
Be warned. The Hills Have Eyes is a most unpleasant film -- but an extremely well made one.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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