I’ve been more than a little upset about the amount of remakes that have been hitting the market in the last year or so. It’s completely uncalled for in most cases. Asian horror films don’t need to necessarily be remade when they came out a few years back in their country of origin, and the Asian language versions usually are much better than the pale imitations that are done here. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, a still is, a cult classic horror film that needed no remake, but Hollywood decided that it was time. When I heard that Wes Craven’s classic The Hills Have Eyes was getting the remake treatment, I wasn’t thrilled, though discovering that Alexandre Aja, the director behind the French import Haute Tension was behind the film did give me a little hope.

When I saw the first trailers for the film, I was a bit disappointed. The story had been changed slightly and it didn’t seem like the film was going to have quite the punch as the original. Well, I have to say, Aja isn’t going to disappoint anyone, and despite some minor changes and additions into Craven’s script, not only does he manage to remake the film with style and class, he actually might have outdone the original in many ways.

The Hills Have Eyes is, like most horror films, a very simple story. A suburban family is on vacation, traveling to California and taking in the sites of the desert. After stopping at an out of the way gas station, they are given a shortcut by the old man who runs the establishment. “Big” Bob (Ted Levine) decides to go ahead and follow the directions, hoping to save a little time on the trip, but that’s the first mistake that this family makes. Their tires blow thanks to a crafty trap by the residents lurking in the hills and stranded in the middle of nowhere, Big Bob decides to head back to the gas station leaving his family behind in what he believes to be relative safety. He’s wrong . . . . dead wrong.

Aja has taken Craven’s original idea of an inbred family lurking in the hills and adjusted it for modern times. Now, we have a family of miners who have been horribly mutated by nuclear testing in the desert, but that doesn’t make them any less frightening, and that’s exactly what Aja plays on with the film. The Hills Have Eyes first teases with the unknown, and it wastes no time. We know that something is out there, but we’re not sure where. We know someone is watching, but we’re not sure exactly who it is, and the family is virtually helpless. After Bob and his son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford) have gone to look for help, there are only a few family members left in the area. Sure, he’s given a gun to his young son Bobby (Dan Byrd) but is that enough to protect his two sisters Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) and Brenda (Emile de Ravin) and mother Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) as well as an infant? Certainly not, and even though the family has two dogs, that’s still not enough.

After making you feel uneasy, the film then goes for shock when we see the gas station owner end his life in a quite graphic way, Big Bob, who seemed to have everything under control is quickly knocked unconscious . . . and then the real terror begins. Aja literally assaults the audience with a brutal trailer attack sequence (like in the original) and while the theatrical version was cut in order to obtain that precious R rating (because you can’t get ads with an NC-17) everything has been put back in. A brutal burning, rape, graphic gun shots to the head, and the film just gets more violent. I’m fairly desensitized (though I’ve never been a fan of rape scenes, and luckily Aja doesn’t do it in a gratuitous means) but by the end of this scene, my pulse was racing and I was completely captivated by the film.

The terror continues when the mutants take Doug’s baby, though we can’t be certain as to why. From what we’ve already been shown, it could be simply to brutalize it, cannibalize the child (and there are scenes involving flesh eating) but that’s more than enough to get Doug to find and rescue his child. This is where there is a change from the original film and Doug stumbles into an abandoned nuclear testing site that the mutants call home. Here the film takes on an air that isn’t unlike Texas Chainsaw or even Aja’s own High Tension. The violence still persists and the film becomes more or less your standard run and chase type of horror film, but this is something that Aja does extremely well, and in The Hills Have Eyes, he may have outdone the pulse pounding sensations that he delivered in Tension.

This type of horror works extremely well however, much better than the killer lurking in the woods, the demonic entity summoned by a puzzle box (don’t get me wrong, I love the Hellraiser films . . . at least the first two) and the horror is a little more real. Aja does love to first of all, have his victims covered almost head to toe in blood, and that doesn’t change in this film either. The Hills Have Eyes is also extremely gory, something that most horror director’s have forgotten about these days. Shock has been cast aside for thrills and predictable scares, but not here. Aja has an in your face approach to this film that can be heart stopping for those that aren’t expecting it, and instead of having the audience know that something gruesome happened, but we don’t see the result, you WILL get to see exactly what happens. Axe in the head? Yes, witness it up close and personal.

The movie itself is brutal and unsettling at times, and the extras that are included are, for the most part, very good. There are two different audio commentaries, the first featuring Aja as well as Gregory Levasseur and Marianne Maddalena. The second actually has Wes Craven and another of the film’s producers, Peter Locke. I can’t think of any better compliment than to have the original director of your remake say what he thinks, and Craven really was impressed with what Aja and Levasseur have done with the film. The making of feature is also fantastic, and this isn’t some minor, five minute piece. At nearly an hour it looks at many aspects, including the special effects for the movie, and is insightful and one of the better behind the scenes features you will find. There are also production diaries which aren’t bad, and a music video, though that part, for me at least, was the more unimpressive part of the extra features presentation.

The original version of The Hills Have Eyes was gritty and sadistic, and Aja’s version is equally so, perhaps even more so given how film and special effects have improved since the 1977 release of Craven’s film. Aja has an eye for horror, and what’s most important about that is that it seems that he’s sticking with the genre, not just using it as a springboard for his career (his next two features are horror as well.) This is one of the few remakes that I have to say is just as good as the original, perhaps even more so in some regards, and that’s something that rarely do we write here. The Hills Have Eyes is terror at its finest, perfectly executed and nihilistic in its approach, a remake befitting of the genre and one that others should be taking notes from.

-mike-