It was so scary I almost fell asleep... The Hills Have Hypnotized Me

Rating: 3/10 (16 July 2006)

I just watched this last night and I have not seen something this bad in a long time. It actually made me mad.... actually it made me almost fall asleep... then I got mad at the end. I'm glad I didn't pay $$$ to see it in the theater, I would have shot my own version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre right there.
First of all, I have never seen the original movie so I can't comment how how great it was or how the remake competes. But as soon as the movie started I already knew exactly the whole plot from beginning to the end. It was like watching the new Chainsaw Massacre plus Wrong Turn combined.
There is zero creativity left in Hollywood for the horror genre and it's sad. And what's worse is that they treat viewers like idiots by producing the same crap again and again and expects us to pay to see it. To illustrate, read movie summary below:
1. Family goes on vacation and drives through remote area
2. Family meets gas attendant, gas attendant works with the freaks/psychos (with zero motivation behind their killing habits except they are all mental)and sends family off to direction of death
3. Family drives toward death and has tires blown by psycho.
4. Family dies one by one.
(cue in me falling asleep here...)
5. One family member becomes super-human and kills psycho one after another, even after being beaten unconscious, knocked over the head, thrown over glass windows, slashed over the face, knocked near unconscious again.
6. Psychos die, the end.
How very original.
And to stretch out the film even longer (or to even have one at all), each family member has the brain size of a pea. And it's the lack of any intelligence of these characters that really ticked me off. The kid in the movie can't aim at all and just randomly shoots at thin air even when the psycho is directly behind him with no weapon. Then there's the superhero who gets saved by the dog, and the first thing he does is run all the way across the house to fetch his baseball bat, when the villain has just dropped the Axe right in front of him.
To continue the plot further along, they have made pea sized brain kid super intelligence near the end. The kid figures out how to make booby trap with a fishing pole, match and gas tank and miraculously learns to do bondage knots on the villain's hand (in a split second) as well.
I felt like I was cheated, like the director was making fun of viewers' intelligence. There is no continuity or any coherence to the whole movie.
Hollywood needs to wake up and stop rehashing old materials again and again... the shock value is numbing, the originality is zero, and the entertainment value is..... Zzzzzzzzzz.
The best horror movie I've seen this year so far is Silent Hill, at least there's originality to the monster design and the adaptation from the game was near perfect.