Ah, the evolution of the movie monster

Rating: 3/10 (10 July 2006)

I admit first off that it is s surprise to me that the new Hills Have Eyes has a higher rating on the IMDb than Wes Craven's original film, a democratic oddity that I chalk up to more and more young people watching the IMDb, not only interested more in newer horror movies than older ones, but interested less in watching original, or even classic, films. I really hope the young people of today are not losing sight of the great films that have come in years past, because that would have a dire effect on the kinds of films that we can expect in the future. On the other hand, I could just be losing interest more and more with disturbing horror movies, although I still love the old ones, so I doubt it.
In this remake of The Hills Have Eyes, the murderous people that come out of the hills are not just cut off from society and displaying the effects of generations of inbreeding, but are instead horrific examples of the effects of nuclear testing in the American deserts of the southwest. So everything needs to be bigger and faster and scarier than the original movie, which may be why the quality always seems to suffer so badly in modern remakes. The traveling family can't just break down, they have to crash, they can't just be on a vacation, they have to be suffering from almost universal internal strife (no one can communicate with each other in a civilized manner), and of course, we can't just have dirty, depraved villains, they have to be cartoonish movie monsters that are barely human. It's sad the effect it takes to shock people these days because filmmakers have lost sight of what is scary and are just going for something grosser than the last movie.
Here's another thing, there's a rape scene in the movie. I hate that. I'm adding rape scenes to my list of things I would be perfectly happy to never see in a movie again, right along with beheadings and anything involving any of the Wayans brothers. Anyway, as with just about every other wrong turn movie (including the god-awful Wrong Turn), a group of morons take the advice of a degenerate gas station attendant and take a dirt road off of the paved road in the middle of the desert, idiotically believing that it is some kind of short cut.
The sad thing is that the mutants' indignation at having been subjected to "your" radioactive poisoning is eventually displayed, as the family is blamed for these peoples' deformities and thus their massacre supposedly justified. Yeah, I have all the sympathy in the world for the people that suffered radioactive poisoning from nuclear testing back in the 1950s and 1960s, but I will go ahead and say right now that the people that are eligible for my sympathy did not think it best to set up residence in the fake town built by the government (and intended to be destroyed) at the bottom of one of the craters created by the bombs and then proceed for generations to mate with each other.
We are then led off on a boring journey of the owners of the eyes doing the eating and the idiot family being eaten. There is no depth to a single character so it's impossible to care about a single one of them (it also doesn't help that not a single one of them made one smart decision in the movie from beginning to end)and we get to see some gore and some heavily made up movie monsters. Yawn.
(spoilers) Oh here's something, why is it okay that a little girl dies in this movie? Is it because she's saving one of the normal people from being killed or because she's deformed? I'm curious as to the assumptions that can be made about modern moviegoers where that didn't kill the movie with controversy, because I can pretty much guarantee that this movie would not have been released if that girl's eyes were even.