starts off good, and then falls DOWN HILL.(ha ha, clever huh)

Rating: 4/10 (18 March 2006)

This film is a basic retelling of a 70's classic. It begins with a radiation team in the hills of the southwest taking reading at a nuclear test site. A man stumbles out of the hills crying for help, but alas, an unseen behemoth lumbers out and savagely kills everyone brutally with a pickax. Jump to a restored RV. Big Bob is taking his two daughters, son, granddaughter, wife and unliked son-in-law to California in his prized restored camper. They stop at the only gas station along a long desert strip and are told of a short cut through the Hills which will chop three hours off their drive. Hint: whenever a creepy looking gas station attendant offers advice, help, suggestions always refuse. If movies like House of Wax and Wrong Turn have taught us nothing else, it's that lonely gas station attendants are in cahoots with inbred, deranged sociopaths. But these people ignore all that, and decide to take the shortcut, fortunately they have two German Shepard's with them. And what do you know, they have cut names, beauty and beast. Shortly along the "shortcut", they blow out their tires and wreck their truck. A strings of tirejaks like the ones cops use, are the culprits, but they don't notice. Beauty is spooked by something and takes off into the hills. She isn't seen again (at least not alive.....muwahahahahahaha!) This is where I have a problem, this dog is such a pussy because it's name is Beauty, and beast turns out to be a real bad-ass, because it's name is beast. Get the allegory? It's two sides of an animals persona. Good and gentle until you F*!K with them, then they get medieval. This is also played upon the characters as well. Like the dumb wimpy son-in-law. He purposefully abstains from taking a gun when he goes for help, but when the sh@t hits the fan and the inbreds attack, he turns into a Bruce Campbell wannabe. Using every imaginable weapon at hand to combat the hill people. Not really believable, then again neither is a band of miners who survive a direct hit by a nuclear test bomb in the Nevada desert to gain superhuman powers and become modern day cannibals. This is where the movie went south for me. I mean some of the improvisation is creative and something I'd do if in a similar situation, IE.blowing a guy up with a gasoline loaded camper, but other stuff was truly ridiculous. Surviving an attack by a seven foot tall, axe wielding monster. Especially after having a couple fingers lopped off. They go so far as to rip off a crucial scene from True Romance. Think James Gandalfini and Patricia Arquette. So basically watch the original, and skip the remake.