Gore galore and nothing more

Rating: 4/10 (5 April 2006)

Wes Craven's 1977 flick "The Hills Have Eyes" has just been remade by Alexandre Aja and would certainly please the targeted audience. If you're looking for hardcore gore, this may work as the film is basically two hours of sadomasochistic viewing pleasure (minus thirty minutes for the character exposition). Else...
Set in an abandoned area of New Mexico, a family on their way to San Diego gets stranded among the hills of the desert. With no contact to the rest of the world, they try to survive the dangers that lurk around them, including psychotic mutated cannibals. Uhm, basically that's all.
Movies of this type don't really rely on plot and characters, so it's natural for the main characters to be stereotypes of various degrees - although to be fair, the script does generate genuine sympathy for the family. The cast also gives a decent performance, with Emilie de Ravine of "Lost" prominently popping first into my mind. (I wonder why.) Aja, who also directed the French horror film "High Tension", amps up the gore level here, drifting over the story at a faster pace, obviously to suit the attention span of its expected viewers. And of course, logic begins to lose its grip and falls off completely behind. Thereon, heads are pierced with picks, fingers are severed, body parts are eaten, and so on.
Sure, ultimately we'll all view it subjectively and there are those who will drool over this kind of stuff. Personally, I find "The Hills Have Eyes" not total crap, with building tension and occasional scares at some point. Still, in the end it's nothing fresh either, without breaking any new grounds and nothing much to offer to anyone else. From the slashing and skewering opening scenes down to the twist, the film becomes not just a remake, it also becomes an index of clichés of the genre it treads on.