Goes flat when it's not being brutal

Rating: 7/10 (10 March 2006)

Alexandre Aja's "The Hills Have Eyes" goes flat when it's not being brutal. It has explosions of violence instead of suspense. The desert dwellers who attack the Carter family look like they stepped out of "Wrong Turn; they're too cartoonish to be truly threatening like the previous tribe, which included the immortal Michael Berryman and James Whitworth as Papa Jupiter. Photographically, the film is slick, and Aja does some good work layering in old photographs of deformed babies and older children suffering gross deformities. If you know the plot of the original, there are no surprises here. Despite its limited budget, the original maintained an atmosphere of dread and doom, and the family felt real. This remake family, unfortunately, feels like a movie family, and I didn't buy them as a unit with a history together. The violence, thankfully, is impactful, and there are shotgun blasts to the head, axes buried in skulls, a slimy mutant incapable of movement, big shotgun deaths, a ghost town that looks like it just got built, a crater of abandoned vehicles, a fantastic little girl mutant with uneven eye sockets, a rape, a burning, and a fast climax. Still, between the good bits, the narrative grinds to a halt because the characters, as newly re-imagined, aren't any more human than the owners of the eyes in the hills.