Gore fans unite! The Hills Have Eyes is one solid flick

Rating: 7/10 (14 March 2006)

Horror movies are in. Big time. They're cheap to make, easy to sell, and almost always make money. Ever since splatter flicks like Saw and the remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre started cutting the movie mustard, Hollywood has been pumping out horror films like water from a sinking dinghy. Yet behind all the flair of Tinseltown's latest line of manufactured monster movies, the audience is left with something to be desired: a horror movie that actually scares.
Well, look no further. The Hills Have Eyes, a well-acted, well-directed new slash-and-smash is the film horror fans have been waiting for.
Hills begins with a team of sweaty government workers in a desolate New Mexican desert. They are testing for radiation when they are attacked by two hideous men who smash the workers' heads against rocks until they are dead.
Then begins the most disturbing opening credits sequence since the movie Se7en, where a collage of horrific footage and photographs is shown like a View-Master from hell, featuring human deformities supposedly caused by nuclear fallout. The film claims that radiation from government A-bomb testing in the southwestern United States caused these deformities as well as the deformities of the villains in the film.
The audience is then introduced to the Carters, an all-American suburban family en route to San Diego for vacation. Kathleen Quinlan (Apollo 13) plays Ethel Carter, mother of Lynne (Vinessa Shaw, Melinda and Melinda), Brenda (Lost's Emilie de Ravin) and Bobby (Dan Byrd, A Cinderella Story). Lynne's husband Doug (Aaron Stanford, X2) is a glasses-wearing cellphone salesman who at first seems more affixed to his gadgets than their baby-daughter Catherine.
Ted Levine (Memoirs of a Geisha) plays ex-cop/pater familias Big Bob Carter, who learns from a seemingly good-natured, toothless old gas station attendant that a shortcut through the hills exists which could shave hours off the family's venture. What Big Bob doesn't expect is the spike strip laid out a few miles down that shortcut, which causes the tires to blow and the axle to snap in half. He also doesn't anticipate the onslaught of hungry and grossly deformed cannibals come nightfall.
Needless to say, Bob Bob's nuclear family is no match for the microwaved mutants from the hills. By the end of the first night, half the family is killed, poor Brenda is molested and raped by a man who closely resembles Sloth from The Goonies, and baby Catherine has a gun pointed at her before she is kidnapped. What follows is an hour of non-stop butt-kicking, ax-swinging, blood-gushing action. The surviving family members take up arms and wage an unholy war against the hill people.
Director Alexandre Aja's update of the gritty 1977 Wes Craven film of the same name is a slaughterhouse of a flick. It boils to the brim of decency with maiming, dismemberment and decapitation. In one scene, a man blows his head through the roof of an outhouse with a shotgun, leaving nothing but a bloody stump. Soon after that, another man is burned alive like a witch on a stake while his family helplessly watches. But, shocking violence aside, the film is frightfully entertaining.
For once, there are some scares in this movie that actually do scare. One scene in particular has one of the most terrifying jumpers since 1999's The Sixth Sense, and another scene, featuring a character aptly named "Big Brain," is a nightmare waiting to happen.
Special effects fans will appreciate the gore galore served up fresh from special effects wizards Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero of K.N.B. EFX Group Inc., Hollywood's premiere gore-makers who have provided stomach-turning effects for films like Hostel and Kill Bill.
Aja, who's High Tension was an international hit last summer, is the Wes Craven of this generation. He directs with the skills of a master, achieving a combination of fine acting, great suspense and some jump-inducing scares.
All in all, The Hills Have Eyes is the fright-flick many have been waiting for. It delivers goretastic goods like a freight train driven by Jeffrey Dahmer. For moviegoers looking for some toxic terror, see this movie.