shows what can be good- and not so good- about a remake

Rating: 5/10 (17 March 2006)

Maybe I shouldn't be looking to making overt comparisons to the Wes Craven 1977 cult film The Hills Have Eyes, of which this Alejandre Aja filmed remake has done over Hollywood style, and just look at it on terms of just being a horror film in and of itself. But even on its own I found this film to just not work for me, even as I recognized things that I admired about it. And maybe it's because I decided to watch the 1977 original earlier this week that that film is so fresh in my mind that I can't help but make comparisons. However, when you are remaking a film that already has a flaw or two, you can either improve, be on par, or just not be as good as that film, or just be so-so on its own terms. Co-writer/director Aja has a film here that does work for its target audience- the young teen horror fan crowd looking for a quick fix of gore and cheap scares done in a somewhat shaky-hand held camera style. But the problem for me was a little more elemental.
For all of Craven's film's shortcomings- mostly by budget and time- was made up for by being a sharply entertaining exploitation flick, building on both the good and evil sides of the characters. This time, Aja is content with making a decent enough set-up for the first half hour or so, and then just plunging the viewer into a kind of checklist horror movie kind of layout. This is not to say he doesn't use the big-studio backup for some good; the makeup by Greg Nicotero on the deformed mutant villains is very cool and creative; the gore factor (not that I was necessarily relying on it for scares, which it didn't really) was very high and well laid out; the performances by the family, for the first half of the film, are believable enough with the dialog. But the problem for me lies in that the second half of the film, where Aja could make this good versus evil struggle scary and intense, into being slightly boring.
Not withstanding the fact that 80% of the original is transplanted (sometimes seemingly with the same shots and angles) into the remake, the new ideas put into the film also aren't launched off with enough to really engage. And then there are the action/bloody horror scenes, where Aja has his fun pitting these quasi super-mutants against our can't-be-beat heroes (one of which seems to survive and fight back with an incredible suspension of disbelief for one), but its not really that per say. So yes, there's more gore than the first go-around, yes, there are some added disturbing elements (i.e. a rape scene, not as disturbing as in some films but gruesome enough), and yes, the twist factor is turned up to 10. But with the turns of the horror-film screw, I just didn't get involved, even in separating myself from the original. And the fact that the mutants are very robotic-like in their pursuit of their semi fish-in-a-barrel takes some of the jump out of some of the could-be scares. It will please many, and if you are just a general horror film fan (and R-rated I mean, it doesn't cheap out on that end) you'll want to check it out). But it's a 'meh' in terms of it being engaging film-making.