This Is Your Remake On STEROIDS!!!

Rating: 8/10 (7 May 2007)

French horror film tyro Alexandre Aja and his production partner Gregory Levasseur just missed giving us a modern-day nightmarish classic by THIS much, with 2003's all-out assault on the senses, HIGH TENSION. It made a great calling card for the duo, combining the balls-to-the-wall sensibility of Seventies grindhouse cinema with a post-modern vibe tinged with the angst and anxiety of a world that seems to be getting a little more out of control every day. From the first twenty minutes of that film, I knew I would be a devoted fan of these new, daring filmmakers.
But then they tacked on an ending that would've made me reach for an air sickness bag if theaters stocked them, because it seemed to be so jarringly, unexpectedly implausible, misogynistic and just plain STUPID. I sincerely believed that they could never redeem themselves as far as I was concerned.
Fast-forward to three years later, after horror legend Wes Craven handpicked Aja and Levasseur to redo his early drive-in favorite, THE HILLS HAVE EYES. By this time, I was absolutely an anti-fan of remakes of any kind. As a rule, most Hollywood remakes and "reimaginings" of classic films have now managed to live down to the lowest of my expectations. Unlike some really well-done examples from back in the Eighties - Cronenberg's THE FLY, Abel Ferarra's BODY SNATCHERS and Chuck Russell's THE BLOB just to name a few - remakes now seemed to be a miserable excuse for some bloated Hollywood suit to command that a beautifully crafted original be stuffed into an effects-laden, badly scripted and acted, PG-13 rated pale imitation of its former self, just to make some ready cash off its ravaged carcass.
I had no hopes at all that this incarnation of THHE would be any different. None. Even though the preview trailers were well-done, it seems that anybody can make fantastic trailers for craptastic films. And with Aja and Levasseur as creators of this new version, I figured that just like with HIGH TENSION, the croissants would surely hit the fan like before.
Happily, for the most part, I'm glad to say I was wrong.
Classic fright film purists who would "fart in this movie's general direction" should give it the benefit of the doubt first. The new script not only remains basically faithful to the original premise, but the manner in which the original film established a reputation for being the second most brutal film Craven ever made for its decade, still holds true with this version for our own times.
Every aspect of the original story is amped up, with a few scary pluses added. Where the former THHE presented a mutant clan that lived in the desert hills with very little explanation for how they got there, Aja and Levasseur plays upon the deepest musings of your most morbid outdoor fantasies with a "what-if" scenario that adds government-sanctioned nuclear testing and the usual bureaucratic screwing-up and screwing-over the "little guys" to give the marginal plausibility a little goosebump-y kick. If you've ever stood in the desert during an off-road trip and gazed at the forbidding hills, wondering what in the hell might be out there besides coyotes and scorpions, this movie provides a gut-churning possible answer.
The best advisory I can provide regarding the violence is that those without "hard-R"-rated constitutions should stay far, far away. The effects work and action sequences here make Craven's original seem almost quaint. And the acting here is more than adequate from the ensemble cast, even if some of the character arcs in the script become a little less than convincing.
I just want to say in closing that I have gained a new respect for director Aja's talents. I still haven't found it in myself to bestow full trust in him after the HIGH TENSION debacle, but the new THHE is certainly a big step in the right direction; not only for him, but for millennial remakes in general.