of Wes Craven’s grisly pop-cult grade-B horror flick of 1977.”
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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A slick updated nasty version of Wes Craven’s grisly pop-cult grade-B
horror flick of 1977 “The Hills Have Eyes.” It’s an over-the-top gore-fest
message movie about America in denial about its misconduct during its cold
war nuclear testing program and in a more circumvent way its failed policy
in its current War on Terrorism. The message delivered as a metaphor is
on the money, but that doesn’t mean it always transfers well into a horror
movie (there’s an overkill in brutality and a lack of novelty that only
ramps up the set pieces from the original but does little else to improve
it). The French writer-director Alexandre Aja (”High Tension”) and co-writer
Grégory Levasseur keep the shocking narrative similar to the original
which was meant to be scary stuff, but it’s now supported with a big budget
and manages to get the monsters better makeup (the original makeup was
cheesy and more laughable than scary) and improve on the special effects
while making the narrative more topical, political and graphic.
The all-American faith-based vacationing Carter family leave Cleveland
for San Diego on their RV trip, and get off the beaten path to look at
the desert of New Mexico (filmed in Morocco). Given a short-cut to get
back on the highway by a creepy hillbilly gas attendant (Tom Bower), one
not listed on the map, Big Bob (Ted Levine), the Carter family patriarch,
conservative and ex-Cleveland detective who now runs a private security
firm, finds on this desolate desert detour they are far from help when
their vehicle breaks an axle. Stuck in the sweltering desert sun the starchy
matriarch Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) leads the family in prayer and then
Big Bob’s “weasel” Democrat son-in-law, Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford),
a cell phone salesman, goes in one direction for help, while Big Bob walks
the 8 miles back to the run-down gas station (the cell phone gets no signal).
The spoiled teen daughter Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) suns herself, while
her impressionable younger teenage brother Bobby (Dan Byrd) runs after
Beauty, one of the family’s two German shepherd’s, with the other named
Beast. Beauty senses there’s someone in the nearby hills, and Bobby finds
Beauty dead and gutted. But when Bobby returns to the campsite, he keeps
it to himself because he doesn’t want to alarm the others. Older sister
Lynne Bukowski (Vinessa Shaw) is nursing baby Catherine, and chatting with
grumpy Brenda, who would rather be in Cancun, about how to make the best
of the disappointing family outing.
Soon the bickering so-called normal nuclear family is targeted for
violence by another nuclear family–a mining family who are victims of
the nuclear testing program conducted in the area from the 1940s to 1950s
when they refused to move, and are now pictured as a pack of amoral and
deformed flesh-eating mutants that have colorful names such as Papa Jupiter
(Billy Drago), Lizard (Robert Joy), and Big Brain (Desmond Askew). The
blood-splatter includes: rape, pickaxe murders, an immolation, cannibalism,
dismemberment, a gun pointed at an abducted baby’s head and various other
unpleasantries. That the victims fight back as the dorky Democrat becomes
an action-hero that even the Republican right-wingers can identify with,
is meant to show that in order to survive in such a terror-filled world
the innocents have to turn as savage as their enemies. But the more advanced
message in the remake uses the silent majority family to make a more potent
political statement about the world’s richest Christian country as a warmongering
country who forces its form of democracy on a country with a different
culture and how this country is left twisting in the wind because its faith-based
beliefs don’t match the country’s corporate ways, where after praying the
same religious people are caught not living fully as Christians but going
after unbridled wealth and power through military might. This might be
reading too much in a pic meant only as a commercial film but, nevertheless,
in all the retro sleaze and lack of subtleties in its splatter there was
at least an attempt to say something relevant about each archetypal family
depicted (the haves and the have-nots), as a foreigner tells his American
audience why the world now hates you as only an outsider can do when most
Americans are still unable to see that they’ve been had by an incompetent
and incurious administration of neocons.