Another "style over substance" Horror film?

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2006)

With "Haute Tension", I felt that Alexandre Aja had a lot of promise in the Horror movie arena. When I learned that he was tackling what I feel to be one of the most overrated Horror films of all time in "The Hills Have Eyes", I was chomping at the bit to see it.
I rented the Unrated version this past week and on top of being disappointed, after stewing a few days, I'm equally as disgusted. Not just with the let down of a film, but the content that was tossed in for the lack of any real story. My biggest gripe was the horribly tasteless rape scenes. Extended scenes of a teenage girl being forcefully raped? A new mother, probably still lactating no less, with this beast sucking on her breasts as she sits there crying? Is this entertainment? Seriously.
People, like the original, are building this up as some Romero-esquire commentary of the depraved nature of human beings in some parts. Are we any better for willfully taking movies like this in? It was bad enough the first 50 minutes of the movie were filled with cheap jump score scares, but the pay off being a bad CGI immolation and some lurid mysogeny? When you helm a remake, you're normally tapped because someone thinks you can improve on the original. Not make an offensive, debauched reinvisioning with more style than substance. The plot was paper thing to begin with, people make it more than it is so that it seems important. This movie could have done without a lot of what made it so evil, and quite possibly still felt fresh and original like "Haute Tension". Instead, it lacked anything engaging, and ended up being pretty much a carbon copy with some added violence to taste.