The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
by Ed Owens

Socio-political subtexts have been a staple of horror films since the silent years, with real fears and anxieties taking on monstrous and surreal forms as a way of confronting and coming to terms with them allegorically: the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the height of America's preoccupation with a looming Communist invasion; radioactive monsters of Godzilla laying siege to a post-Hiroshima Japan; or the sublimely dysfunctional household from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a time when many were mourning the death of the traditional nuclear family. Remaking such films becomes a more difficult task when lifted from their original cultural context, forcing filmmakers to recontextualize the new film to reflect modern day horrors or risk producing an empty exercise in genre conventions without any real world resonance. With his new remake of Wes Craven's subversive exploitation pic The Hills Have Eyes, Alexandre Aja has chosen the former, though apparently subtlety and restraint were never even an afterthought.

The story, modified from the original in a handful of small but important ways, is classic shock theater--an extended family traveling through the Nevada desert breaks down (literally and figuratively) and is set upon by a clan of cannibals who have made the surrounding hills their home. Craven's original film, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was a sharply observed and darkly subversive critique of the nuclear family and its inherent denial of the counter-culture which surrounded it. The suburban vacationers and the cannabilistic cave-dwellers are flip sides of the same coin, the friction of their confrontation wearing down any pretense of repression until the two become mirror images of each other (Craven explicitly draws this out in a number of sequences).

Aja opens his film by giving the clan a more explicit backstory, using a montage of nuclear test footage, newspaper clippings, and still images of babies with birth defects set to the twangy strains of Webb Pierce's "More and More" (for the record, Craven never explicitly connected the cannibals with nuclear testing other than setting the film on an abandoned testing site), and this revised backstory creates problems for Aja later on because of the thematic shift it introduces (an obnoxiously pedantic monologue from the clan's hideously deformed patriarch spells out the problem explicitly).

Rather than pitting repressive tradition against cultural change, Aja's conflict takes on the moral trappings of an anti-imperialist screed ("People like you made us," the patriarch mutters between tortured breaths), a notion that is visually and narratively reinforced throughout the film (the image of a the uber-conservative father -a retired policeman whose very occupation is emblematic of government and authority-impaled by his own proudly displayed American flag, for instance, or the Magnum, carried for protection, that is inevitably turned against the family itself). The inherent dilemma embedded in the film's climax-as horrific as the clan's victimization of the Carter family is, they remain inherently victims themselves-is one that Aja seems ill-prepared (or, more likely, unaware of how) to resolve. There is in Craven's denouement the unsettling proposition that the threat savagery poses to civility can only be answered with like-minded savagery, that violence is the only defense against violence (or at least the only defense apparent to those who would presume to protect civility, no matter how forced or imposed, at all costs). Aja answers his own anti-militarism with...a brand of heroic militarism, one that can only shrug its shoulders at its own inherent irony.

Aja doesn't so much allow his socio-political subtext to emerge as forcibly bludgeon us with it, availing himself of every conceivable opportunity (as well as some I would have considered inconceivable prior to seeing the film) to drive home his point with all the subtlety of a pickaxe to the head: the Carter family is so stereotypically conservative that some will anxiously look forward to their eventual torture (the aforementioned American flag becomes a particularly cringe-inducing tool in the game of thematic Pong that ensues) and any point which might have gone unnoticed is either repeated ad nauseum or accompanied by every attention-getting stylistic tic short of a neon sign (the film's climax is shot and scored in an unmistakable allusion to the Western, complete with its own generic baggage that only deepens the problem).

But even tossing aside Aja's pretentiously didactic subtext yields a deeply flawed film that fails to satisfy. The film relies more than a little too heavily on cheap scares, and even the "shocking gore" seems meticulously calculated for maximum crowd-pleasing effect. Where Craven's earlier film was subversive and counter-culture, the studio stamp can be seen on nearly every frame of Aja's reworking. Worst of all, Aja pads out several scenes to the point that they become more yawn-inducing than tension-building, and even the changes from day to night and back again can't keep the desert landscape from becoming repetitive and monotonous. It turns out that the most horrifying thing about The Hills Have Eyes is the fact that for much of ts running time, it's actually painfully dull...and that's not the horror most of us are looking for.