Finally A Good Remake

Rating: 9/10 (3 April 2006)

I am actually quite embarrassed to say this but I actually did not want to see this movie at all at the beginning of the year. On another thread here I actually put this film on my "Have no care to see" list and boy was I wrong.
Anyway, Alexandre Aja has breathed new life into the horror genre of today and I hope he keeps at it. The Hills Have Eyes is a remake of the 1977 Wes Craven film of the same name. In this day of remake central, I had very low expectations for this film, considering I fell victim to the ridiculous hype for the joke of a movie Hostel earlier this year. This film was widely publicized so I thought it would just be another teeny bop movie that wouldn't be that impressive. I was dead wrong.
The Hills Have Eyes is so simple that it should be bad, yet it isn't. A vacationing family gets stranded in the middle of the New Mexico desert, where a group of descendants of mutated miners call home. In these deserts fifty years earlier, nuclear testing was conducting and the mining families chose not to leave.
The doomed vacationing family consists of a mother, father, two daughters, a son, the oldest daughter's husband, and their baby girl. The film is very slow at the beginning but we get glimpses of the mutants early in the film.
As nightfall nears, the family decides to split up and search for help. The father goes back to a gas station they passed earlier, the daughter's husband decides to go up ahead for help, and the rest of the family stays with their car and trailer. Thorughout the beginning of the film, however, a mutant girl by the name of Ruby is shown sporting the son's windbreaker but doesn't seem hostile. Cue the cliché dog running away into the hills and what ensues next is a barrage of disturbing encounters with the mutants and brutal murders. In a matter of five minutes, half of the family is killed, one of the daughters is raped, and the baby is kidnapped. The deaths are very gory and done with great skill in detail.
The remaining family members gather their wits together and decide to make a stand. The baby's father goes out to search for her, while the son and youngest daughter stay back at the crash site. The baby's father comes along a mining town that was used for nuclear testing and is the home of the mutant colony. He goes through hell trying to find his baby but he eventually sees Ruby on top of a mountain running with the baby in her hands, trying to save her from a cold-blooded death from one of the other mutants. The baby's father transforms from a white collar punk to Superman and goes on a killing spree trying to rescue his daughter. He eventually meets up with Ruby where she attempts to give the baby back to her father, but not before the last remaining mutant alive attempts to kill them all. Ruby ends up saving the day sacrificing her life for the baby and her father. The end.
From that basic plot this movie may seem kind of dull, but it is not. It is a great story with excellent direction and suspense. Aja knows exactly how to scare people and how to make his antagonists personable and evil. The acting was horrible though, in my opinion. I actually wouldn't have minded if the whole family was wiped out. They were the most annoying group of people I have ever seen on film. I was starting to wonder who was actually the mutants. The mutants seemed to have more brain power than these morons.
I find it funny that the one character that I did identify with was Ruby. For a mutant, she was a cute girl with a heart of gold. She tried to warn the family with acute warning signs, but they just did not understand them. Throughout the movie I was hoping she would live or at least show the family she meant good.
Overall the film was good. The dogs were VERY annoying and so was the youngest daughter. With as many clichés this movie was saturated with and terrible acting it contained, it was not that predictable. The order of deaths was very surprising and I dare anyone to say they were not shocked when each person died at the moment in time they did. The music was awesome in this film and so was the opening credit sequence. I loved how Aja meshed the happy and jolly music with the snapshots of mutated humans. Excellent movie.
*** out of ****
Congratulations Alexandre Aja for making a remake that was good. I guess there is a first for everything.