Overall Rating
  Awesome: 24.51%
Worth A Look: 25.49%
Average: 30.39%
Pretty Bad: 15.69%
Total Crap: 3.92%
8 reviews, 54 user ratings
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| Hills Have Eyes, The (2006) |
by Doug Bentin
"If gross is what grinds the bones to make your bread . . ."
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Wes Craven’s original of this film, released in 1977, drew its inspiration from the Scottish legend of Sawney Bean, a family man whose brood lived in the Scots highlands and waylaid unsuspecting travelers, killing them for the coin in their pockets and the meat on their bones.So, which side of me won? The side that was looking forward to “The Hills Have Eyes” because it’s directed by Alexandre Aja, the young French guy who made “High Tension,” the best new horror film I saw in 2005, or the side that dreaded “The Hills Have Eyes” because it’s another 1970s monster mash re-hash? The good twin or the evil twin?
Well, since I’m a movie reviewer, it would have to be between the evil twin and the even more evil twin.
Call it a TKO for the Even More Evil Twin in the last round.
The scene is the New Mexico desert 50 years after the U.S. government has concluded its test of The Bomb at the site of a small mining town. A family consisting of father Big Bob (Ted Levine), mom (Kathleen Quinlan) married daughter (Vinessa Shae), her husband Doug (Aaron Stanford), their baby, and two teens (Emilie de Ravin and Dan Byrd), pulls into one of those Last-Stop-for-200-Miles gas stations, and the shifty attendant sends them on a dirt road “short cut.” Anyone up for a chorus of “Highway to Hell”?
Someone along the road deliberately blows out their tires. They’re too far off the blazed path to use a cell phone and as night settles in, the bomb-damage mutants who live in the rocks attack the Airstream in search of loot, gals to rape, and human bodies to cannibalize.
Act one gets us into the trouble. Act two is primarily siege, and act three sends the previously ineffectual Doug into the enemy camp to rescue his kidnapped baby.
Act two is where everything falls apart. It’s here that Aja lets us get a look at the mutated uglies that are after the good folks in the trailer. Yeah, the makeup guys have done a smack-up job making the cannibals look hideous, like human versions of the three-eyed fish on “The Simpsons,” but they were a lot scarier when they were just fleeting figures running across the screen, or shadowy whatzits in our peripheral vision. As soon as we see what they are, they lose a lot of their fear factor.
The tension picks up in act three as Doug searches in the mining town for his missing kid. It’s one of those places wherein the government set up mannequins as stand-ins for humans so the effects of radioactive wind could be tested, and the mutants have re-situated the dummies to substitute for real people. The mannequins placed naturalistically among the mid-1950s décor and relentless dust make for some mighty creepy visuals.
But that’s about as far as it goes. Aja is one of those horror directors who are convinced that people covered in blood, bearing ugly faces, and lots of axes are scary. They’re not. At best, they’re just gross.
“The Hills Have Eyes” is one of those horror movies that freak out people who don’t see horror movies very often, and the reason they don’t see more of them is because the last one they saw was like “The Hills Have Eyes”—depending on sudden loud noises and ultra-violence for most of its BOO moments. It doesn’t aim very high, so the targets it does manage to hit are pretty close to the ground.It’s not quite a yawn, but it sure isn’t a yell, either.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14095&reviewer=405
originally posted: 03/22/06 03:46:59
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Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
10-Mar-2006 (R)
DVD: 20-Jun-2006
UK
10-Mar-2006
Australia
20-Apr-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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