Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
The Hills Have Eyes
Rated R for strong and gruesome violence and terror throughout, and for language;
The remake of Wes Craven's 1977 film sets the horror in the New Mexico desert, where a family of mutants created by decades of U.S. nuclear testing feasts on a travelers sent on a shortcut through the hills.
Ted Levine ("The Silence of the Lambs," "Monk") and Kathleen Quinlan ("Apollo 13") are Bob and Ethel, celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary by taking a cross country trip along with children Brenda (Emilie de Ravin of "Lost"), Bobby (Dan Byrd), and daughter Lynne (Vinessa Shaw) and her husband Doug (Aaron Stanford) and their baby. Bob is a tough-talking Republican detective, Doug a wimpy, wife-dominated, gun-averse Democrat cell-phone salesman. Guess which one will figure heavily in the upcoming battle.
Aja flinches not a bit in depicting burnings, shootings, beatings, axings and the resulting agony among those who survive the first few rounds.
The mutant family lives in an abandoned test village from the '50s in blast-scarred but neat homes with mid-century modern furniture, Ozzie-and-Harriet mannequins at the dinner table, plastic tykes on swingsets -- a brilliantly realized set.
"The Hills Have Eyes" is hard-core, '70s-style violent, more stylish and better acted than most horror films creeping into theaters.
But Aja's relies too much on a schmaltzy-scary score -- a shriek of music as a figure flashes across the screen and ominous tones throughout. We don't need a crash of sound to be frightened by these things that live in the hills.
