Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 9, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Say this for the recent trend toward remaking horror favorites from the ’70s: It’s likely that projects as unremittingly grisly and brutal as the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead and now The Hills Have Eyes might have had a lot more trouble getting in the studio doors were they not based on recognizable known quantities. Whatever one thinks of their overall quality, it has to be acknowledged that the Chainsaw and Dawn reduxes made honorable attempts to recapture the intensity of their forebears. But the 21st-century Hills is the first of this group to outdo its predecessor, elaborating on Wes Craven’s original in ways that both honor and improve upon it, with genuinely bloodcurdling results.
For the first hour or so, the script by the High Tension team of Alexandre Aja (who also directed) and Grégory Levasseur is uncommonly faithful to the first film, from character names (right down to German shepherds Beauty and Beast) to mayhem (fiery arboreal crucifixion, parakeet abuse, etc.). Once again, the Carter family, led by patriarch Big Bob (a terrifically cast-against-type Ted Levine), haul their RV through a desolate expanse of desert, ill-advisedly taking a shortcut to California explained to them by a creepy gas-station attendant. One well-placed strip of spikes in the road later, the Carters become stranded in the middle of nowhere, where they are preyed upon by a savage brood lurking in the surrounding hills and caves.
The key difference between Aja’s version and Craven’s is the former’s reimagining of the antagonists. In the ’77 film, the “hills family” weren’t the most attractive folks in the world, but beyond the memorable visage of Michael Berryman, they wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd of bikers or rural bar patrons. It’s not giving anything away (since it’s established in the evocative title sequence) to say that the new movie’s villains are literally mutants—the descendants of desert miners physically ravaged by the effects of nuclear testing. A few of the names remain (Pluto, Papa Jupiter) but the faces have changed dramatically, thanks to the excellent makeup FX work of KNB’s Gregory Nicotero, Howard Berger and crew.
The altered origin also ends up intensifying the social and political subtexts that Craven (who produced this version, along with Marianne Maddalena and original producer Peter Locke) wove into his Hills. That film continued the concerns of Craven’s earlier Last House on the Left, examining how a “nice, normal” family can transform into merciless killers under the right stress. Here, the central character is Doug (Aaron Stanford), a passive cell-phone salesman who has married into the Carter clan and is derided as “a Democrat” by the proudly gun-totin’ Big Bob. Once the situation starts becoming dire, Doug is forced into the role of protector and avenger, and as he embraces his inner NRA member, he becomes a more ruthless and efficient killer than even the human monsters he battles.
This Republican scenario might warm the heart of George Bush, and could seem a little startling coming from Craven, who has notoriously clashed with the conservative MPAA, and from Aja and Levasseur, who are, after all, French. Yet given the repeated shots of signage and newspaper clippings emphasizing the government’s role in the nuke tests, the ultimate allegory seems to be that of a military operation undertaken without thought of the long-range consequences to innocent people (sound familiar?)—either the subjects of the mutation, or the travelers they attack.
In any case, for those unconcerned with such highfalutin thoughts who simply want a good, scary ride, The Hills Have Eyes delivers and then some. Like the best horror filmmakers, Aja and Levasseur are careful with their buildup, establishing the Carters as a group who believably needle and squabble with each other without losing our sympathy. In addition to Levine and Stanford, the naturalistic and empathetic performers also include Kathleen Quinlan as the sensible mother, Vinessa Shaw and Emilie de Ravin as the daughters and Dan (Mortuary) Byrd as the teen son (his father’s boy, who has no problem packing a pistol). They are quite believably opposed by a well-chosen group of prosthetics-enhanced actors playing the human monsters, led by Robert Joy, so likable as the equally scarred Charlie in Land of the Dead and here the very picture of animalistic menace as Lizard.
The new Hills downplays the symmetry between the two families emphasized in the original, to the point where Papa Jupiter (Billy Drago, whose angular features have made him a perennial screen villain, but here is one of the most normal-looking of the bunch) doesn’t really seem to be running things. If anyone seems to have control over the others, it’s Lizard, who leads the assault on the trailer and the women inside it that provides Hills’ horrific centerpiece. Going above and beyond its harrowing counterpart in Craven’s version, the lengthy attack is a true nightmare captured on film, serving notice that this is horror without compromise. (The movie has lost a few moments of explicit bloodshed on the way to its R rating, but its impact has barely been diluted—and in fact, a couple of the setpieces are more plausible without those excesses.)
Beyond the KNB boys, kudos should also be given to production designer Joseph Nemec III, who truly shines when Doug finds his way onto the mutants’ turf, and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. Lensing on Moroccan locations, he turns the foreign soil into a landscape that appears believable as the American Southwest, but also comes across as threateningly alien. Adding to the jitters is a nerve-jangling score by tomandandy, whose work at times combines with Alexandre’s to evoke movies dating back even before Craven’s Hills. Between the oppressively sun-baked and dust-blown images and the twangy vibe of the music, Doug’s quest onto deadly ground winds up with the veneer of a classic spaghetti Western.
