'The Hills' can be hard on the eyes

Remake of Craven cult film takes violence, gore to next level

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, March 10, 2006

This vivid but brutal remake of Wes Craven's 1977 cult favorite The Hills Have Eyes made me a little sick with its gore and extreme violence. I can't say the movie isn't effective at what it sets out to do, I just didn't want it done to me.

If you're the sort of horror aficionado who enjoys sleazy, body-mutilating gore (a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), you may want to hustle to a theater to see this updated, souped-up version of Craven's film.

Craven's movie featured cannibal mutants who set one of the characters on fire. Grindhouse audiences were impressed. The remake follows suit.

French director Alexandre Aja, who made 2003's High Tension, employs lots of new technology to make the gore more graphic and the horror more horrifying, but even in a newly minted and (heaven help us) socially conscious version, the movie manages to be a tense but often repellent helping of (pardon the expression) carnage.

So, didn't the original also have disgusting aspects? Yes, but there's a difference. Movies such as the original The Hills Have Eyes were relegated to the backwaters of theatrical distribution.

They had a kind of perverse, renegade quality that fit movies that were trying to slip through cinema's back door. When you put this kind of movie into the mainstream, it surrenders cult status, thereby losing a certain amount of immunity from scorn.

The story is simple, the characterizations minimal.

The Carter family drives across the country, their Airstream trailer in tow. Dad (Ted Levine) is a former policeman who has a stronger belief in togetherness than does the rest of his brood, a wife, two kids and a married son and daughter with a baby.

And, yes, the baby will be put in jeopardy and used to whip up tension as its father (Aaron Stanford) battles mutants to a bloody pulp.

All the trouble starts when Levine's character - called Big Bob - takes the advice of gas-station attendant, thus violating an iron-clad movie rule: Never travel on a lonely road suggested by a man whose teeth are stained yellow and whose overalls are filthy.

Anyway, the family soon is stranded in the New Mexico desert (the movie was shot in Morocco), where they begin to be attacked by mutants that look like . . . well . . . mutants, with wispy memories of hair, faces twisted with deformity, snaggle-toothed mouths, the whole sickening nine yards.

It's just here that the movie attempts to display a social conscience.

The mutants, you see, are the descendants of miners who refused to leave their mine during atomic tests. They're victims.

So it turns out, we made them into monsters who inhabit trashed- out villages originally built by the Department of Energy to assess bomb damage.

Because they were pawns of an indifferent government, the mutants are motivated to gut-shoot a woman or to rip the innards out of a dog and turn it into dinner.

If your attention begins to wander, don't fret.

Another ax soon will dig into another skull. At times, the mutants even try to have their way (sexually speaking) with the women in the family. Let's just say they're not subtle lovers.

Is the director serious? A few self-conscious touches (a mutant stabbed with an American flag, for example) make you wonder whether Aja isn't ducking out on his own gory convictions by winking at the audience.

A triumphal musical score is the work of either an ironist or someone with really bizarre judgment.

Mostly, though, Hills plays gory hardball, using its skills to make an audience cringe.

In the end, Stanford's Doug marches into mutant territory to retrieve his baby.

So, go if you want. Personally, I'd rather watch someone barbecue steaks than people.

Besides, these days we don't seem too worried about nuclear fallout.

Maybe we should start worrying a little more about what we're ingesting with our popcorn. Just a thought en route to the next blood bath.