The Hills Have Eyes is a 2006 horror film and remake of Wes Craven's 1977 film of the same name. Written by filmmaking partners Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur of the French horror film Haute Tension, and directed by Aja, the film follows a family who becomes the target of a group of mutants after their car breaks down in the desert.

The film was released theatrically in the United States and United Kingdom on March 10, 2006. It earned $15.5 million in its opening weekend in the U.S., where it was originally rated NC-17 for strong gruesome violence, but was later edited down to an R-rating. An unrated DVD version was released on June 20, 2006. A sequel, The Hills Have Eyes 2, was released in theaters March 23, 2007.

In this day, it seems horror directors can go one of two ways. One, the MTV-Stylized, "Boo! You're scared!" direction and two, the ultra graphic/disturbing direction. Both directions carry one thing in common - they're horror films, and they're meant to scare...

Saw, for example, isn't as scary as it is just plain nasty. When a Stranger Calls is about as scary as The Perfect Man, and The Perfect Man's only scary because Hilary Duff's in it...and Hilary Duff's only scary because atrocious actresses should not be succeeding and living the American Dream...

But, I'm digressing. The Hills Have Eyes shares much more with the Saw movies, except...it's really the first gory horror movie in over two years that is actually, well, scary. When you're not only feeling tension in your eyes, but you're also getting goosebumps, beating at a faster rate, and glued to the screen, hoping for a resolution and an end, you're plain and simply scared. SCARED.

The Hills Have Eyes is so scary, it almost becomes an internal contest, where you start asking yourself "how much longer can I sit through this?" It's the kind of movie where you can't take a deep breath and make the horror go away, the kind where you can't just tell yourself "oh, it's only fiction."

I'm not saying it's realistic. Far from it, though the actors do all they can to maintain some sort of realism when put against a guy as insane as Alexandre Aja. Speaking of Aja, the deaths are so ridiculous, but Aja knows the beauty of slashers. Which makes him god-like, compared to all other horror directors these days.

Only other problem? The first part is too slow.

A-.

When you look up the definition of a crowd pleaser, you will find The Hills Have Eyes. Simply put, I haven't had this much fun watching a movie in a long time. The gore ranks up there with the best of them, but the several axe blows to the head and gun shots to the head puts this one at the top of the list.

The trailer scene gave me chills along with the mutant eating either the mother or daughter (couldn't tell which one it was) at the end. Seeing the mutants raping and molesting the woman gave me goosebumps with the father burning alive and the mother walking in on it.

I haven't seen an audience get so into a movie before with almost a standing ovation when he stuck the American flag through the mutants neck. This was a much improved version of Hostel for me.

A

P.S. - That dog kicked ass

It always begins with the Wrong Gas Station. In real life, as I pointed out in my review of a previous Wrong Gas Station movie, most gas stations are clean, well-lighted places, where you can buy not only gasoline but groceries, clothes, electronic devices, Jeff Foxworthy CDs and a full line of Harley merchandise. In horror movies, however, the only gas station in the world is located on a desolate road in a godforsaken backwater. It is staffed by a degenerate who shuffles out in his coveralls and runs through a disgusting repertory of scratchings, spittings, chewings, twitchings and leerings, while thoughtfully shifting mucus up and down his throat.

The clean-cut heroes of the movie, be they a family on vacation, newlyweds, college students or backpackers, all have one thing in common. They believe everything this man tells them, especially when he suggests they turn left on the unpaved road for a shortcut. Does it ever occur to them that in this desolate wasteland with only one main road, it must be the road to stay on if they ever again want to use their cell phones?

No. It does not. They take the fatal detour, and find themselves the prey of demented mutant incestuous cannibalistic gnashing slobberers, who carry pickaxes the way other people carry umbrellas. They occupy junkyards, towns made entirely of wax, nuclear waste zones and Motel Hell ("It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent's fritters"). That is the destiny that befalls a vacationing family in "The Hills Have Eyes," which is a very loose remake of Wes Craven's 1977 movie of the same name.

The Carter family is on vacation. Dad (Ted Levine) is a retired detective who plans to become a security guard. Mom is sane, lovable Kathleen Quinlan. A daughter and son in law (Vinessa Shaw and Aaron Stanford) have a newborn babe. There are also two other Carter children (Dan Byrd and Emilie de Ravin), and two dogs, named Beauty and Beast. They have hitched up an Airstream and are on a jolly family vacation through the test zones where 331 atmospheric nuclear tests took place in the 1950s and 1960s.

After the Carters turn down the wrong road, they're fair game for the people who are the eyes of the hills. These are descendants of miners who refused to leave their homes when the government ordered them away from the testing grounds. They hid in mines, drank radioactive water, reproduced with their damaged DNA, and brought forth mutants, who live by eating trapped tourists. There is an old bomb crater filled with the abandoned cars and trucks of their countless victims. It is curiously touching, in the middle of this polluted wasteland, to see a car that was towing a boat that still has its outboard motor attached. No one has explained what the boat was seeking at that altitude.

The plot is easily guessed. Ominous events occur. The family makes the fatal mistake of splitting up; dad walks back to the Wrong Gas Station, while the dogs bark like crazy and run away, and young Bobby chases them into the hills. Meanwhile, the mutants entertain themselves by passing in front of the camera so quickly you can't really see them, while we hear a loud sound, halfway between a swatch and a swootch, on the soundtrack. Just as a knife in a slasher movie can make a sharpening sound just because it exists, so do mutants make swatches and swootches when they run in front of cameras.

I received some apppalled feedback when I praised Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" (2005), but I admired two things about it: (1) It desired to entertain and not merely to sicken, and (2) its depraved killers were individuals with personalities, histories and motives. "The Hills Have Eyes" finds an intriguing setting in "typical" fake towns built by the government, populated by mannequins and intended to be destroyed by nuclear blasts. But its mutants are simply engines of destruction. There is a misshapen creature who coordinates attacks with a walkie-talkie; I would have liked to know more about him, but no luck.

Nobody in this movie has ever seen a Dead Teenager Movie, and so they don't know (1) you never go off alone, (2) you especially never go off alone at night, and (3) you never follow your dog when it races off barking insanely, because you have more sense than the dog. It is also possibly not a good idea to walk back to the Wrong Gas Station to get help from the degenerate who sent you on the detour in the first place.

It is not faulty logic that derails "The Hills have Eyes," however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony. We have the eaters and the eatees, and they will follow their destinies until some kind of desperate denouement, possibly followed by a final shot showing that It's Not Really Over, and there will be a "The Hills Have Eyes II." Of course, there was already "The Hills Have Eyes II" (1985), but then again there was "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977) and that didn't stop them. Maybe this will. Isn't it pretty to think so.

You do know there's a rape in the original Hills Have Eyes, right? And what's more disturbing to you: the rape, or the fact the mother doesn't fight back because one of the mutants trains a pistol on her baby's head?

Wondering if anyone else noticed this nifty little subtext...

The only two people killed with guns in the entire film are two of the family members, and it's with their own gun. Yes, the family of the father that was so adamant on having them.

Aja is such an evil little liberal.

Didn't three family members die from guns? The dad, the mother and the oldest daughter...? The dad was the only one that seemed to be political about it too. I do like the quote though "I'll take my bullets over your prayers any day".