I am actually quite embarassed to say this but I actually did not want to see this movie at all at the beginning of the year.  On another thread here I actually put this film on my "Have no care to see" list and boy was I wrong.

Anyway, Alexandre Aja has breathed new life into the horror genre of today and I hope he keeps at it.  The Hills Have Eyes is a remake of the 1977 Wes Craven film of the same name.  In this day of remake central, I had very low expectations for this film, considering I fell victim to the ridiculous hype for the joke of a movie Hostel earlier this year.  This film was widely publicized so I thought it would just be another teeny bop movie that wouldn't be that impressive.  I was dead wrong.

The Hills Have Eyes is so simple that it should be bad, yet it isn't.  A vactioning family gets stranded in the middle of the New Mexico desert, where a group of descendants of mutated miners call home.  In these deserts fifty years earlier, nuclear testing was conducting and the mining families chose not to leave.  

The doomed vactioning family consists of a mother, father, two daughers, a son, the oldest daugher's husband, and their baby girl.  The film is very slow at the beginning but we get glimpses of the mutants early in the film.

As nightfall nears, the family decides to split up and search for help.  The father goes back to a gas station they passed earlier, the daughter's husband decides to go up ahead for help, and the rest of the family stays with their car and trailer.  Thorughout the beginning of the film, however, a mutant girl by the name of Ruby is shown sporting the son's windbreaker but doesn't seem hostile.  Cue the cliche dog running away into the hills and what ensues next is a barrage of disturbing encounters with the mutants and brutal murders.  In a matter of five minutes, half of the family is killed, one of the daughters is raped, and the baby is kidnapped.  The deaths are very gory and done with great skill in detail.

The remaining family members gather their wits together and decide to make a stand.  The baby's father goes out to search for her, while the son and youngest daughter stay back at the crash site.  The baby's father comes along a mining town that was used for nuclear testing and is the home of the mutant colony.  He goes through hell trying to find his baby but he eventually sees Ruby on top of a mountain running with the baby in her hands, trying to save her from a cold-blooded death from one of the other mutants.  The baby's father transforms from a white collar punk to Superman and goes on a killing spree trying to rescue his daugher.  He eventually meets up with Ruby where she attempts to give the baby back to her father, but not before the last remaining mutant alive attempts to kill them all.  Ruby ends up saving the day sacrificing her life for the baby and her father.  The end.

From that basic plot this movie may seem kind of dull, but it is not.  It is a great stoy with excellent direction and suspense.  Aja knows exactly how to scare people and how to make his antagonists personable and evil.  The acting was horrible though, in my opinion.  I actually wouldn't have minded if the whole family was wiped out.  They were the most annoying group of people I have ever seen on film.  I was starting to wonder who was actually the mutants.  The mutants seemed to have more brain power than these morons.

I find it funny that the one character that I did identify with was Ruby.  For a mutant, she was a cute girl with a heart of gold.  She tried to warn the family with acute warning signs, but they just did not understand them.  Throughout the movie I was hoping she would live or at least show the family she meant good.

Overall the film was good.  The dogs were VERY annoying and so was the youngest daughter.  With as many cliches this movie was saturated with and terrible acting it contained, it was not that predictable.  The order of deaths was very surprising and I dare anyone to say they were not shocked when each person died at the moment in time they did.  The music was awesome in this film and so was the opening credit sequence.  I loved how Aja meshed the happy and jolly music with the snapshots of mutated humans.  Excellent movie.  

*** out of ****

Congratulations Alexandre Aja for making a remake that was good.  I guess there is a first for everything.                

    

Me and my girlfriend are going to see this tonight.  I hope it's as g0od as you say it is, it looks really ko0l.

Better than the original but still is was just allright. Still a whole lot better than most of the horrorsthat have came out in the past few years. The mutants just weren't believeable and took me right out of the movie. It looked like make-up. I was very disappointed with that because I love Greg Nicotero's work. The preformances were good especially the kid that played Bobby. Alexandre Aja is definitely showing that he has great talents in the horror genre.

Believe or not, I actually didn't care for this one. It was one of the only remakes I thought was worth checking out this year but I was disappointed. The writing and acting wasn't that great and the overall look of the thing was too glossy and full of typical MTV style editing (except for the night scenes which were excellent). Plus they pretty much wasted my favorite character from the original, Papa Jupiter. I was astounded that he was even in this but he only appeared twice on screen and barely had any dialogue. They might as well have left him out.

The movie wasn't terrible though, just not that good. It was kind of fun to watch the scenes Aja took directly from the original (though their impact wasn't nearly as strong) but the best parts of the movie were the parts that Aja added himself (the scenes in the abandoned village). The violence was executed pretty good as well. It was brutal and ugly; not presented in the clean, "acceptable" manner it is in most Hollywood horror movies.

Overall, it was a step up from the typical Hollywood remake but a major step down from Haute Tension. Nevertheless, I still think Aja has potential and look forward to what he produces in the future.  

wow
all i must say is this movie was amazing

WOW. I really liked this movie, the opening was great.  I think this is one of the better horror movies in the past while, probably since the devil's rejects.  I thought it was a little too mtv oliver stonish at parts, but the last act was unrelenting and intense.  The part with the guy trapped in that freezer with all the dead bodies was great and disgusting.

One of the better horror films to come within three years. I've never seen the original and I'm glad because all the twists/character deaths were unexpected towards me. This is an extremely intense, disturbing, and ultimately violent horror film.

This is a very mean and cruel movie. These people are good folks(despite the fact they always bitch) and they don't deserve anything that comes. Oh yeah, its the parents anniversary!

SEMI-SPOILERS

A family on vacation is given wrong directions by a gas station attendent. Was it done purposely for him thinking Lynn saw the objects inside his room or was it simply because he is sadistic? Anyhow, family takes shortcut and crashes into a boulder.

Big Bob, the father, decides to walk back to the gas station to call for a tow truck and the son-in-law walks the other direction to look for help, while the younger brother Bobby goes and looks for their annoying dogs Beauty and Beast. THATS when everything begins.

Night falls and only the son-in-law is back(I forgot his name!). The father has a sweet intense scene back at the gas station "Daddy. Oh Daddy!". Bobby gets back to the trailer and first warns his sister Lynn and her husband that "we're not alone. There's people..." They settle him down.

IN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES IS SHEER SUSPENSE AND UNEXPECTED VIOLENCE which leaves half the family dead and the audience in WTF. The order of body count is unexpected, seriously. This was mean to watch.

Then the next 30-40 minutes is just intense and bloody as hell. The icebox scene was purely nasty. Overall, very exciting and unique. Disturbing as hell and its actually pretty damn scary.

-ONEY

I'm going to have to see this again. Everyone's raving about it and I think it's made me realize that perhaps I enjoyed the movie a little more than I let on. I think the fact that it was a remake clouded my vision somewhat (though I still say the acting was bad).

This movie kept me jumping out of my seat. The whole audience were screaming and the mutant made an axe look scarier than a chainsaw.

this movie is the prime example of the fact that you can still take a cliched, overused plot premise and make it into a fairly good movie... just simply by executing it well.

I could have seen "Slither"... I could have seen "Thank You for Smoking"... but the powers that be dragged me into the theater to see "The Hills Have Eyes" (I'm sure every guy on this board knows who that "power" is).

To be honest, I wasn't dragged in at all.  I was actually very much looking forward to this, as I was a very big fan of Alexandre Aja's debut, "Haute Tension."  Unfortunately, as somebody else all ready wrote on this board, this is actually quite a step down for Aja from "Tension."

That's not to say this remake is bad because it certainly is not... well, not all together anyway.  It's just that there are a shit load of great, kick ass horror scenes that are quickly followed by a shit load of utter cliche crap.  This is, without a doubt, one of the most frustrating horror films I have ever seen.  There is a scene early on after the first initial attack where the youngest son attempts to go outside with a gun, seeking revenge.  His brother-in-law quickly grabs him and yanks him back inside the trailer, telling him they needed a plan first... and then thirty seconds later, they all wander outdoors.

That about explains this entire movie.  First something very cool and unique and original... quickly followed by the most stereotypical horror element possible.  Oddly, though, this is the first film I think I have ever seen where both the victims as well as the monsters break the horror movie rules (for every scene of one of the humans not just shooting their attacker with the readily available gun, there is a scene of one of the mutants not killing off their victim with the readily available axe).

I must restate, I really did not dislike this movie.  It's just that, well, despite my attempts to always be non-biased... it's just such a dissapointment.  Though, if there is one really good thing to say, it is to commend the awesome make-up job done by Greg Nicotero and his crew.  If there was any digital work in this movie, I certainly could not tell.  I just wish that the same work that went into the make-up would have gone into the script.

**1/2 out of ****