Reviewed by Tim Wong

POTTED with cut-price shock tactics and gratuitous prosthetic violence, The Hills Have Eyes couldn’t be anymore robotic in its assembly of the 21st century horror film. This, an update of Wes Craven’s seventies roadtrip ordeal, is itself a retread of genre snuff trailblazers Hostel and Saw: it is not quite the torture fantasy of those films, but is pretty much as violent, senseless, and mind-numbing on all fronts.


The popular consensus by now is that horror films of this ilk are simply no longer scary, bypassing the impregnation of ideas (which when allowed to gestate, make for the most frightening and enduring horror movies) for litres of blood, a scream-track, and masochism on tap. What’s exceptionally pointless in The Hills Have Eyes’ case is that it is also the bane of Hollywood’s insipid output – a remake – and is therefore nothing more than a hollow receptacle for dismembered limbs and grisly shotgun decapitations. In other words, violence without strings.

Director Alexandre Aja is a sadist with a fetish for designer gore, no more. Little surprise, then, that he opens impetuously with a team of scientists slaughtered by atomic mutants – who needs haute tension when you can cut right to chase? From then, it’s only a matter of time before the film’s caravan of Middle Americans are seized upon by those lurking in the hills: a cast of radiation-deformed freaks who make the original film’s band of inbred savages look decidedly civilised.

More repugnant than terrifying, the sight of Lost’s Emilie de Ravin being violated by a Michael Berryman knock-off who looks more like Sloth from The Goonies is where the film ended for me. The women are brutalised – throwback rape-revenge misogyny is still being peddled, unbelievably – while the men rally, fight back, and get to split a few skulls in defence.

Aja adds zilch to Craven’s grindhouse template apart from a sequence involving a dilapidated mining settlement: ghost town to the film’s disgruntled toxic avengers pulverised by the military’s fallout experiments. Little wonder that a half-assed political easter egg has been smuggled into yet another mainstream studio production. Slightly more interesting is the film’s twist on the frontier western: a sort of scorched earth outpost where the “natives” have resisted takeover, and now occupy the land. Venturing into forbidden territory, the film’s doomed trailer-traveling family probably get what they deserve (they’re unlikeable for a start), but Aja is having none of it, conceiving them as gun-toting, prayer reciting Republicans – permission, apparently, to strike back with extreme prejudice.

Indeed, retaliation is the operative word. Never mind this hot-button idea of complicity, allowed to creep pertinently into a number of recent revenge pictures astute enough to address the notion of cruel vengeance. What matters in Aja’s incendiary world is that people kill for pleasure, guilt-free. A shrieking de Ravin driving an axe mercilessly into the face of one of her attackers says as much. A baseless exercise in graphic trauma, The Hills Have Eyes bludgeons throughout, debilitates by the end, and leaves one anaesthetized to the ravages of cold-blooded violence – most worryingly, the scariest thing about this film.