The hills may have eyes, but sadly, no brains & no purpose

Rating: 1/10 (30 May 2018)

This boring and cliched remake, or re-imagining or whatever they class them as these days, is nothing more than a shameless cash-grab, filled with gore for the sake of gore. Seemingly there is no originality in movie making any more and the only way to get people to watch is to fill it with any and all manner of atrocities and label it as entertainment.
The Hills have Eyes is yet another in a long line of unnecessary movies that try to convince the world that the U.S is full of inbred and radiation affected cannibals and murderers preying on countless hapless tourists and somehow successfully managing to get away with it for generations. While the 1977 version was done at a time when a story such as this was more intriguing, without the copious amounts of gore, this updated version just comes off as stupid and predictable.
Apparently from the the end of the second world war and the early 60's, there were hundreds of nuclear tests complete with the obligatory government denial about genetic defects caused by the fallout. As the movie starts we get historical footage of nuclear tests done in the pacific (nowhere near New Mexico) as well as desert tests with mock towns etc. Spliced in with this footage are random shots of deformed babies in jars and mutated limbs and you can tell that there'd be more than a few people who'd think all this is real, just like the alleged based on true event stories like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or House of 1000 Corpses and dozens of movies like them.
Movie starts with a scientific team collecting samples in an irradiated area for testing purposes and they are all killed off by an unknown, abnormally strong killer using a pick-axe. We are then introduced to the group of unsuspecting victims, a family and their 2 dogs who stop at a, (now wait for it), a gas station! Just in case you didn't see that coming; and who is it who greets them? That's right, it's the unkempt and rather odd acting attendant. Do we have mobile phone coverage? Anyone care to take a guess? Of course we don't. One of them actually mentions that there's cell coverage over 97% of the country and they're in the remaining 3%. It's amazing how often that happens.
What comes next so obvious a blind person can see it coming. Family has no idea where they really are or where they're going, the "helpful" attendant tells them about a shortcut, so of course they decide to take it and not stay on the nice sealed road, tires blow out due to a hidden spike trap, both men go off in different directions, ones finds a massive impact crater with multiple abandoned vehicles indicating that an unusual amount of people have all disappeared in the same area and no one in authority has bothered to really look for them, the other guy ends up back at the gas station and finds newspaper clippings about mysterious disappearances despite all the cars, caravans, boats etc being in the open and easily visible from the air.
The family ends up being attacked, several members are tortured and killed, the baby is kidnapped and the remainder of the movie is a random assortment of violent acts perpetrated by both sides as the remaining family members tries to stay alive long enough to get away in relatively one piece.
Overall, I just can't see why a movie like this even needs to be made or re-imagined and in my opinion, while this updated version isn't a direct scene by scene duplicate, there is nothing here that really ads to or compliments the source material. It's the same as some faceless DJ running an old pop song through a computer and "creating" a soulless dance track; you didn't do anything except suck the guts out of it. If this were an original movie, albeit based on a derivative idea, it'd probably be worse. For some reason the abandoned nuclear testing town still full of mannequin residents, cars, indoor furniture and fixtures has amazingly been hooked up to a generator so they can watch TV. While these towns were designed to simulate the real thing, having TV's that not only work, yet can also receive broadcasts sends an already unbelievable premise hurtling into absurdity.
We're being led to believe that genetically mutated and misshapen cannibals who can barely string 2 words together, can set elaborate traps, evade detection for decades, can conceive children or look after abducted children, construct working generators and working appliances all while subsisting on nothing more than human bodies. Not only is it impossible, it doesn't even work as a piece of fiction. I can see more believability in the existence of Superman, seeing as he was at least alien, than I can in radiation from nuclear testing creating a family of stunted and yet super-intelligent freaks. I get that all artistic work is inspired from something else and is therefore derivative of what came before, but I hate it when there is practically no creative input into ripping off a story that's already been done and done better and then accepting kudos for making it worse. I guess this version will appeal to fans of gore and sadly not much else.