Disgusting and unnecessary film that offers nothing bar that adrenaline kick once the pain causers get their comeuppance.

Rating: 5/10 (1 December 2008)

Yes, it's one of those films that's so gruesome and nasty you're either going to enjoy it and love it for its pure, out and out effectiveness or hate it for the exact same reason. Horror as a genre has that ability, like comedy, to produce content some will take to but others will not. The Hills Have Eyes to some will be a thrill ride of adrenaline and eventual retribution played out in glorious, grimy, grungy cinematography; to others it'll be a freak show with few redeeming features. Truth is, the film is more of a freak show with few redeeming features than it is an intelligent and interesting exercise in horror but comes complete with daft metaphors and ill logic at times.
The original was made at a time when the genre was on the cusp of a wave. 1972's Deliverance and 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre helped launch the idea of out-of-towners stranded, lost and helpless in a wilderness unbeknownst to them. Wes Craven's 1977 version was about a family getting stranded right where they didn't want to be and the 2006 remake is a similar set up: place the pigeons exactly where you want them and unleash the cats.
The trouble is The Hills Have Eyes is just this followed by an orgy of buckets of blood, violence and disturbance. It's not like Deliverance or Hooper's 'Chainsaw' movie in the sense it doesn't incorporate the location as a third element to the character's survival (as the forests of Deliverance did) but merely renders the desert in which it's set a large, open space people must take ages in travelling through. Additionally, it lacks the sense of danger Hopper's 'Texas Chainsaw' had, which gave us a fair amount of suspense and disturbance in equal measure, as seen in the dinner table scene nearer the end and the chase through the woods/country house prior to that. The Hills Have Eyes ignores elements of chase and setting up a potentially nasty encounter and skips straight to the shock and horror of it all.
The film begins with a montage of nuclear weapons being tested which immediately reminded me of the opening of 1998's Godzilla, but it is as much about nuclear testing and makes about as much-a statement on nuclear testing as Godzilla did, which is zilch. Once the set up has been done and a gas station attendant has an attacks of morals, the film gets going; descending into its messy and needlessly unpleasant procession. Throughout the course of the film, we will get to see loved one's watch their other loved ones burnt to death whilst being alive the whole time. We will also get to see someone else being raped in front of the family members, also watching on, and in clear, obvious un-comfort – is this supposed to be entertaining? Is this the level these action/horror hybrids have sunk to?
But the film isn't just a series of scenes in which we get to see harmless, innocent people suffer at the hands of creatures that get no introduction bar a nuclear testing montage and a small title paragraph of information. The film is about a band of Americans; a band of Americans in a desert locale getting horribly picked off one by one by an enemy they have no clue to either: how to defeat at first; where they are coming from or what they even are. Parallels could be read into to do with the Iraq war or general conflict in the middle east and it may well be that people look back at this film in years to come as some sort of parallel to these events.
Talking of the location being a large and wide open space that bamboozles and forces the family to cover large distances, why is it that the mutants whom eventually show themselves are able to negotiate and hide within the canyons whenever the family try to intercept or chase them down? Some of the more would-be humbling scenes such as one family member discovering a graveyard of previous victims' cars have been done before, recently in a film entitled Wrong Turn so the impact does not hit you like the makers want it to and thus, it comes off as uninspiring and flat.
I think The Hills Have Eyes is supposed to be a thrill-a-minute, action film that entertains and scares in equal measure but it's more of one, long sick procession of gore and unpleasantness that nobody needs to see – was there a point to all of this? Even more-so, was there a point of remaking the original? One element of real distaste arrives in the form of a young female character who sunbathes in a bikini, is provocatively shot and states she'd "rather be in Cancun" – it's clear the audience is supposed to be attracted to her since she's shot accordingly so. It is when that character is raped later on that we get to see possible repressed fantasies the film embedded within our psyche earlier on, getting played out. Like this tiny element and the Iraq war situation acting as a metaphorical backdrop, the film is needless and unpleasant thus allowing most people to come away from the film thinking they've seen something brilliant, purely because they've been taken on a roller-coaster of thrills, spills and surging hormones – what a shame.