The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes is a 2006 remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 film of the same name. Directed by Alexandre Aja and written by Aja and Gregory Levasseur, the film was released in March of 2006 and was a reasonably commercial success. It received mixed reviews overall, achieving 50% overall at the critical aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. The idea for the remake came after Wes Craven saw the success of other remakes of horror films, including remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror. Craven began to look at various directors and filmmakers to remake his 1977 film and settled on Aja, the director and writer of French slasher film Haute Tension.

Aja and Levasseur got to work on writing the film, using Craven’s original ideas for a starting point and building on them. Casting completed and the film was ready for filming. Aja didn’t want to shoot the film in Victorville, California, like the original film, so he scouted locations in New Mexico, South Africa, Namibia, and Mexico. He eventually settled on filming in the “gateway to the Sahara desert”, Morocco. The Hills Have Eyes is set in New Mexico, which seems to imply that the state was the setting for numerous nuclear tests. New Mexico was the site of the first nuclear test, the Trinity test, but most of the above ground tests took place in Nevada.

The idea of nuclear testing is at the forefront of The Hills Have Eyes. The film focuses in on an area in New Mexico that was utilized for nuclear testing and a group of individuals that remained in the area during the testing. The individuals became deformed and resentful, given to insanity and crazed ways of life. The group has apparently worked out some sort of deal with the elderly, lonely gas station attendant nearby. Of course, all of the gas stations in these types of films are rundown and dark, so it’s no surprise that this one is too. It’s also no surprise that our protagonists should arrive as a large family and need gas at the gas station from hell. Furthermore, it’s no surprise that our trusty elderly and gross gas station attendant should send the family off towards a “shortcut” that leads to a whole mess of trouble. That, essentially, is The Hills Have Eyes.

The Hills Have Eyes stars Aaron Stanford as Democrat Doug, who refuses to use guns and works in telecommunications like most left-leaning liberals in America. His wife is Lynn, played by Vinessa Shaw. She is the oldest sibling of the Carter family, with whom Doug and Lynn are travelling on this family vacation from hell. What makes the vacation hellish is the annoying nature of the characters. Emilie de Ravin plays Brenda Carter, the youngest sibling of the Carters, a sun-tanning lazy brat who talks about “the Chronic” like she’s Ice Cube. Dan Byrd is Bobby Carter, Brenda’s brother in this alliteration obsessed crew. Kathleen Quinlan stars as Ethel Carter, the mother, and Ted Levine is Big Bob Carter, the father. That, dear friends, is the Carter clan and they are the victims and heroes of The Hills Have Eyes.

Aja puts his film together like a music video, using fast cuts and faster edits to splice scenes together like some sort of maddening metal song. The soundtrack doesn’t help much, put together by tomandandy, a musical duo that works with various avant-garde styles and sounds. The Hills Have Eyes has a soundtrack that is mostly based on sounds and sudden guitar crushes, as well as some hyper-annoying upsweeping melodies that sound like they belong at a fireworks display. For some reason, the music in the film really annoyed me.

The style of the film is okay, apart from the direction and soundtrack. The Hills Have Eyes does capture the stark nature of the location with reasonably good effect. The use of the various government produced fake villages for testing is a nice touch, as these empty, creepy places leave a lot of room for action and gore. Some of the setups in the film are interesting, but most are familiar to anyone familiar with the genre. The Hills Have Eyes descends into the normative chaos of most horror films in its final half and, instead of producing new thrills and chills bent on destructing the genre while remaining faithful to it, Aja’s film mines the depths of commonality and looks almost lazy.

The Hills Have Eyes told me nothing about its characters and spent little time on the more interesting components, instead choosing to build the Carters into a family that I felt little to no sympathy for. Aja’s film skimps on the development of what could have been rather rich characterizations and, instead, gives us glimpses of what could have been. An example of this is the character that speaks instructions into a walky-talky. Obviously these mutants have some form of organization, as they lay down a spike strip and work with the gas station attendant. It would have been interesting to have a bit more insight into the arrangement and into the organizational instincts of these creatures, but instead we are merely given a peek at the resentment they have for the nuclear fallout and, right on cue, their monstrous rage as a result. Why or how they’ve come to prey on tourists is, unfortunately, not explored.

The Hills Have Eyes should be satisfactory for those horror fans looking for a gory treat, but it’s hardly a monstrosity of a film. It’s about as good or bad as most nu-horror films and is right on par with Saw and others. I found nothing overly compelling about the film and the gore and violence got old rather quickly. The idea that there’s a sequel to mine this material isn’t altogether surprising, nor is it encouraging when it comes to the future of what is consistently a tired and overdone genre. American horror is, once again, on familiar ground with 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes.

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