*checks watch* 

Okay, now that we have that unpleasantness out of the way, I’d like to put up for consideration Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s early masterpiece, The Hills Have Eyes.  Now, the original film is one of the few horror films that I hold near and dear to my heart, as it is one of the first films that I found to be truly affecting when watching it.  I can watch Jason lop off heads and splatter brains left and right without the slightest of glances.  I can watch Freddy splay some oversexed teenager end to end in a spray of grue and gore without batting an eye.  However, when a new mother is shot to death while trying to save the life of her screaming baby after watching her sister raped and mother murdered, I am affected.  When I watch her husband, who just moments before was making love to her, cry out to the heavens at the unfairness of it all, I am affected.  When I see the vengeance he must take to save the last of his family, I am affected.  As such, the original Hills is a rare film that resonates with me, and was also one I was most wary of hearing about being on the remake train.  Just hearing about it I knew it was going to be bastardized, while seeing the pretty young cast I knew it was a setup for more WB wannabes to run around with a bit of blood on their shirts screaming and pretending it was a horror movie.

Well, once again I find myself in a position of being wrong, and once again I find myself glad for it.  Alexandre Aja’s take on The Hills Have Eyes is brutal, bloody, and far from the fun that most horror films these days try to be, and though it has faults it is still one of the best horror films of the last year.

I could go through the plot but, well, given all the promotion it’s gotten you’ve probably heard it a million times over so I’m going to get on to what I think about it.  This was quite clearly a labor of love on Aja’s side, as every slightest detail of the film is taken upon with the greatest of care.  Even though they could have taken carte blanche with the plot and taken it any way they wanted to, they maintained a great closeness to the original film.  If anything, for the first two acts up until the trailer scene, it’s very nearly shot for shot with the slightest of plot variations in any direction.  When it comes to the last act though, the film takes a radical departure from the original, taking us to a bombed out village that had been used for the testing of nuclear weapons that the hill people have decided to call home.  The story is very tightly written and filmed with the greatest of care towards being as creepy as possible (particularly the crater full of cars and the infamous trailer scene), yet not perfect.  Unlike the original, the hill people here are relegated more towards nameless, deformed monsters with little character behind them.  They’re no longer a family that we can relate to, with members who joke and argue and who still love each other (albeit the fact that they’re inbred cannibals), which makes the moral standing of this film seem to belong solely to the Carter family.  There’s no longer any conflicting emotions when one of the hill people dies, as it’s just another monster down.

All complaints aside though, most everything about the film is perfect.  The characters are all well cast, each role seeming as if it were tailor made to the actor cast, with particularly good performances by Aaron Stanford, Vinessa Shaw and Ted Levine in making the Carter family that much more sympathetic.  On the other end of the spectrum, Robert Joy is just plain old-fashioned scary as the hill person Lizard, and when I thought that no one could top Lance Gordon’s terrifying Mars from the original, I find myself once again delightfully proven wrong.  However, I do wish we’d seen more of Billy Drago’s Papa Jupe, as I personally felt his casting was inspired, and given his lack of screentime in this version and prominence in the first I’ll admit to being the slightest bit confused and let down.

Special mention has to go out to the KNB effects team, and as I always say they can do no wrong, they once again prove me correct.  Instead of mutations from inbreeding as they were in the first film, this movie’s mutants are a result of radiation exposure over decades of government nuclear bomb testing.  Taking cues from real incidents (children born in the wake of Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam), the look of the hill people is one grounded in frightening reality instead of making them simply lopsided monsters.  Particular props must be given to whoever came up with the design for Big Brain, as that look is simply unsettling in it’s realism.

In the end, The Hills Have Eyes is what every remake should try to be.  It takes something we know, sticks close enough to it to make it familiar yet takes it in all new directions.  It’s a modern film that embraces it’s roots and does not take away from the original film’s starkness in the slightest, a miracle in this day and age of happy endings at all costs.  It’s not perfect, but at the same time I found myself pleasantly surprised that The Hills Have Eyes was done justice.  I tip my hat to you Mr. Aja.