Solidly entertaining horror, but no classic.

Rating: 7/10 (21 August 2006)

With his debut feature Haute Tension, director Alexandre Aja received mixed reviews: some saw the film as a breath of fresh air and hailed Aja as the future of horror; others lambasted it for stealing the plot from Dean Koontz's book Intensity and delivering an unbelievable twist ending. I am definitely in that second camp.
Aja proved to me that he certainly has no problem in delivering the requisite gore and he has an eye for a nicely framed shot, but decent ideas and an inability to create an atmosphere seem to be his sticking points. For his second movie, remaking a classic like The Hills Have Eyes didn't seem like such a wise move to me.
The new version, for the most part, follows the original pretty faithfully (a family gets stranded in the desert and are attacked by cannibalistic mutants) but adds all of the bells and whistles too often expected of a modern horror movie: we get loads of extremely convincing gore, a pretty girl, some MTV style editing, and the possibility of a sequel. The result is a relentlessly gruelling experience, but Aja forgets a couple of things that would've massively enhanced the experience for me: a smidgen of tension and a tad of originality.
Aja makes the mistake of thinking that, by totally disgusting his audience, he can ignore the fact that a good horror should scare. I love a decent dose of gore as much as the next splatter fan, but I like to be frightened too and feel that Aja missed a great opportunity to absolutely terrify the pants off the audience.
The French director also loses his way when the movie veers too close to Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory: Doug (Aaron Stanford), the pacifist husband of eldest daughter Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) discovers the home town of the mutants, a dilapidated nuclear-bomb test area, whilst searching for his abducted baby daughter. In one of the decaying houses, he discovers a chair-bound freak who handily fills in the audience with some background story detailing the cannibals' existence. Doug is then captured by the freaks, and subjected to all kinds of horror in a charnel house before escaping, and exacting bloody revenge. This whole section is way over-the-top, stretches plausibility and seems completely out-of-place. It was if Aja, knowing that he wouldn't get a chance to remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (having already been retold in 2003), tried to shoehorn his version into this film instead.
The Hills Have Eyes is a passable slab of modern horror; it does manage to revolt and is never boring, but I do think that Aja needs to choose his next project very carefully. I sincerely believe that he has talent and, at some point in the future, he will deliver a truly great horror film; one that doesn't rely on borrowing thematically from others or on dishing out excess gore. I look forward to that day.