A very good remake, although I can't remember the first one

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2006)

I am always at a crossroads when a remake of a movie comes out and I can hardly remember the original (if at all!). Do I rent the original so that I can compare? Or do I stay away and let the remake attempt to formulate an impression on me before revisiting the past? Decisions, decisions.
Well, when it came to The Hills Have Eyes, I decided NOT to see the original again before the screening of the new 2006 edition. Although I am sure that Wes Craven did an 'admirable' job 30 years ago with the original, it couldn't have been that good since even seeing the movie poster and reviewing the plot outline couldn't initiate any memories whatsoever.
In retrospect, this was a very good decision.
The new Hills Have Eyes comes to us via Alexandre Aja, who shocked North American late night audiences with 2003's High Tension (also known as Haute Tension, also known as Switchblade Romance). In that film, Aja brought us back to the bloody horror films that we enjoyed so much back in the 70's and 80's as Cécile De France played a cat and mouse game with a serious sociopathic serial killer (.or did she? Ha Ha).
So when I heard that Aja was helming a film that would not be poorly dubbed and consisted of the terrorizing of an American family by a group of psychotic and radiation deformed stalkers in a desert, well, damn, I said "sign me up!!!" And while you are at it, sign my friends up too, for The Hills Have Eyes is a good film in a genre that struggles to produce consistency in a world where the local news provides more terror than producers can hope to duplicate without fear of an NC-17 rating being slapped on their finished product.
The Hills Have Eyes stars Ted Levine (Monk) and Kathleen Quinlan (Apollo 13) as two members of the Carter family that are traveling through New Mexico when their truck is forced off the road via the ole 'spikes hidden on the road' trick. That then leaves the California dreamers (consisting of mom, pop, three children, a son-in-law, a newborn and some dogs) stranded in the middle of nowhere, and this nowhere just happens to have some mutated flesh-eating murders hiding in dem der hills.
The result might be typical horror film, i.e. family gets picked off one by one while getting a few of the baddies along the way, but Aja has a unique way of getting us there with true scares, gore galore and atmosphere which is usually the most lacking in entries of this type. Note, the atmosphere does come at the expense of thriller time and the movie does have faults in that it has large lapses between action, but it's a small price to pay and rest assured, you will get your fill of blood and guts before looking over your shoulder while navigating back to your car after the showing.
There is a rape scene that now takes the award for making me feel the most uncomfortable away from the pedophiles in Running Scared, and there are enough axe swings to make Paul Bunyan's arms sore. If it's blood you crave there was enough in The Hills Have Eyes for two films which is probably why the producers had to lobby to ensure the film only got an R-Rating.
So while every other week it would seem that Hollywood is rehashing a Japanese director's celluloid sneeze, The Hills Have Eyes was exactly what the doctor ordered. It was good, scary - at times frightening and the perfect compliment leading into the big budget bullcrap we are about to get once the season changes.