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PLOT: An RV-pulling, vacationing family takes a wrong turn in the Nevada desert and is besieged by a family of atomic-test-mutated cannibals. After some of the family are slaughtered, the survivors turn the tables and wreak revenge.
There's a lot of Wes Craven's original in Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. So much so, it's like seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in 2006 and thinking "Ohmigod, that old You-talking-to-me?' bit! How hack is that?'"
Craven's career-launching 1977 film -- about an RV-pulling whitebread family, terrorized and slaughtered by cannibal mutants in the Nevada desert -- was nihilistic, shocking and sensational for its time.
It also inspired a generation of mostly-inferior sick-flicks. So the question must be asked, why remake The Hills Have Eyes when it can't help but look derivative in today's sea of slash? At the very least, it behooves newbie director Alexandre Aja (High Tension) to bring something new to the table.
What he brings is a 21st Century sensibility -- ie. he speeds up the pace for video-game kids and tosses away any dweeby subtext that would slow things down.
This seems to be standard practice in horror remakes these days. Look at how cleanly they excised the consumerist-satire from Dawn Of The Dead for example.
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But bearing in mind the classic review line "What's good isn't original and what's original isn't good," this remake of The Hills Have Eyes still manages to evoke its quota of creepiness -- primarily from the disturbing visages of mutated freaks, the ostensible result of Nevada desert nuke testing.
Retaining most of the same characters and plot points from the original, The Hills Have Eyes opens with the Carters -- Big Bob (Ted Levine), wife Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan), teens Bobby (Dan Byrd) and Brenda (Emilie de Ravin), daughter Lynne (Vinessa Shaw), her yuppie mate Doug (Aaron Stanford) and their baby -- rolling through the desert and getting gas from a weirded out old coot at a dusty roadside station.
A dubious "shortcut" tip later, their tires are blown out and the Carters are stranded in 100-degree heat, at the mercy of giggling homicidal freaks with names like Jupiter, Lizard and Pluto. We don't waste a lot of time getting to know them (and yet, with all subtlety chopped away, the newer movie is 10-minutes plus longer). After an initial, brutal and sickening attack in the family trailer (the nadir of which sees a freak licking captive Lynne's lactating breast), the pendulum is swung the other way, with Bobby and Doug and faithful dog Beast leading their own gruesome counter-attacks.
The mutated "family" members definitely don't have the personality of their predecessors (old school horror fans will miss the creepy visage of original Pluto Michael Berryman).
But they make reasonably good whipping posts for fans of set-'em-up/chop-'em-to-pieces revenge horror.
It's beautifully shot, in all its dusty, desert bleakness, disturbing and more graphically violent than the earlier incarnation.
But the question "Why?" remains valid.
BOTTOM LINE: The million-dollar question remains, why remake a classic horror film? There's enough of the original here to remind you what a template Wes Craven's signature film was for a generation of mostly-inferior sick-flicks. But Alexandre Aja brings nothing to the table except a faster pace for today's attention span and a bit more of a graphic touch.
(This film is rated 18-A)