An promising premise without a good delivery

Rating: 5/10 (11 March 2006)

In The Hills Have Eyes, an American family is driving to California through the desert when they are set upon by the mutated children of miners who refused to abandon their homes in a government nuclear testing zone.
I'm not much of a horror buff, so perhaps some of the grandeur of this film was lost on me. The beginning of the movie is awesome - a mysterious figure with a pickaxe savagely demolishes a group of scientists checking for radiation. But after that, it all kind of goes downhill. The mutated monster people aren't very well done - most look a bit like deformed teenagers with really bad acne and sunburns. The sounds they make (breathing, laughing, etc.) sound a lot like Sloth from Goonies, which makes it hard to take seriously. They also spend too much time on screen - once you see them, the scares are pretty much over - all that's left is a prolonged fight or rape scene. It really felt more like an action movie than a horror flick.
As far as the rape scene, it's very drawn out, and it would be hard to tell it was actually a rape without the dialogue and situation (girl with nightgown hiked up to thighs, monster holding her down, girl crying, monster number 2 saying "It takes a man to do that" or something to that effect). There is a second sexually explicit scene where are monster is sucking a girl's breast, which I found more disturbing.
The best part of the movie hands down is when Doug decides to take the fight to the monsters. This is kind of ruined by some serious mistakes by one of the monsters who actually beats the crap out of him (he's locked in a big meat container rather than killed - um... ooook...). The beating Doug's character takes is also kind of ridiculous. However, when Doug has the axe, that right there is pretty much the coolest part of any movie I've seen so far this year.
This film was fairly violent, but most of it has to do with eating things (strangely enough) or with things that are already dead. The body parts the monsters eat, and the corpses of things they've killed before the family came along are all fairly grody. But the actually killings of the family aren't that bad (although the suicide of the gas station attendent is quite gruesome). No intestines falling out, brains on the floor, etc. Mostly just fingers and arms being chopped off, lots of blood, and nasty cuts. Saving Private Ryan is more graphic than this.
I think the main reason I didn't like this film was that they showed too much of the monsters. If they had just stuck to keeping them off-camera for more of the film, it would have been scarier. But once you see that the villains are simply red-neck mutant desert cannibals who've been out in the sun too long, it's like "Oh... yay..." Or at least they could have developed their characters more. I'd give this a 3/10, but Doug's rampage with the axe bumps it up to a 5/10. Bottom line: it's not really scary, and the monsters are Star Trek rejects. You want to be scared, go rent The Relic.