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THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006)
Mutants too mutated even for Michael Berryman! I know, your gut reaction to all these remakes is probably about the same as mine was, for a while...Hollywood is out of ideas, they're ruining a good movie, and paying to see a movie like this is a de facto vote for more of the same. Let me play a little devil's advocate here and address these points. 1. Hollywood isn't any more "out of ideas" than it ever was, it's just a business that's trying to make money with a minimum of risk. Since it's a business comprised of people (many of whom won't be working at the companies they're at in five, ten years) nobody wants to back a movie that'll be a slow-burn hit over a decade or so, that makes other people money while the people who made the decisions in the first place aren't working there anymore. They want a movie that'll make its money as quickly as possible, and it's hard to go wrong with some name recognition. 2. Nobody's ruining a good movie - the original is still there for anyone to see. If anything, a remake is about the best thing that can happen to one of these older films - it sparks a resurgence of curiosity about the original, often accompanied by a deluxe video re-release (and the biggest promotional push that original movie got since its theatrical release, or likely to see ever again). Five years after the remake, the original has some new fans, the old fans have snazzy deluxe DVD's of it, and unworthy remakes are in most cases forgotten. Everybody wins. The only downside is that some cine-murderer like Michael Bay wins more than anybody. 3. Yeah, so what's the problem? You think that if these don't get made, new and original horror movies will in their place? Go buy a ticket to what you think looks interesting, whatever the genre, whoever's in it, whoever will profit from it. Stop worrying about what larger statement you think that ticket means. If you see many movies at all, you're going to pay for some turkeys eventually. There's no use in boycotting on principle what can simply be avoided by developing your crapola detector...actually there's no use in boycotting it period. If you needed any further proof that any horror movie that gets a theatrical release in North America is already considered a hit, even if nobody sees it, look no further than the fact that there's actually a House Of The Dead 2. The remake trend is nowhere near as suffocatingly widespread as the sequel trend was (and in many cases, still is), and is not likely to last as long, as while you can only remake a movie maybe once in a generation, you can have five sequels in five years. Some of these remakes are borderline sequels anyway (is the '03 Chainsaw movie any further out of continuity with the original than the three official sequels?)...maybe those are the ones that should be most deserving of our scorn? I don't know. In the meantime, while we ride this trend out, we might as well let ourselves enjoy the good ones. Frankly, the original The Hills Have Eyes, specifically, is as perfect a candidate for a remaking as any I can imagine...loved the setup but didn't like how it played out. Would somebody hurry up and remake Frightmare? This remake was directed and co-written by Alexandre Aja, most famous for French import hit High Tension where he certainly demonstrated that he can make a good movie, since he made ¾ of one. I confess I was holding my breath later in this movie in the fear that he'd flush it at the end, but it didn't happen. There's some dumb behavior both on the part of the mutants (leaving a living victim unattended with a weapon nearby), and the family (leaving a living victim unattended with a weapon nearby...the whole theatre groaned when he dropped that shotgun), but it's not like there's an "it was all a dream!" moment or anything. The plot is exhaustively faithful to the original film, though the cannibalism angle is made a little vague and the mutants are shown less as a small family with a small family's story than an isolated, if sparsely populated, society of their own. A tri-generational family (this time patriarched by Ted Levine) gets some bad directions at a creepy desert gas station and finds themselves the target of mutant hillbillies, who whittle away all their advantages (dogs, guns) until they don't have any left. Aja was willing to have a little boy killed with a shotgun in his last movie, so you know going in that nobody's entirely safe here. The violence is punishing, sometimes seemingly random (though again, lock-step with the original), and not without consequence; when members of the good family die (and there's no bothering to make the mutants sympathetic), there is grief and anger over it for as long as the survivors aren't in immediate, mortal danger. The desert scenery is grim and harsh, helped by the score by the "tomandandy" twosome which is often even more noisy, stinger-y, and unmusical than that in High Tension, but it works, except for a goofily "triumphant" theme used twice late in the movie. Performances all around are excellent - most of these people are meat on the hoof but they're acting like they don't know it, and that's a big part of what often separates good horror flicks from merely passable ones. Like the Dawn Of The Dead remake, this Hills is a less thematically rich but more kinetic and visceral horror flick than its original, and a lot more fun. But like the original Hills was never as good as Dawn, this isn't quite as good as the Dawn remake. Too much dumb behavior, and I would've thought that the young mutant children which show up for one scene would have been the most freakish of all, since they're third (at least!)-generation mutants, but they're borderline cute. One of the movie's climaxes awkwardly depends on a new mutant we hadn't even seen before (though it spares us the sillier MacGyverism of the original). And if you never saw the original, you'd never even know why the mutant girl drops off scavenged loot at the gas station. Still, one of the best of the remake crop of the last few years. Now that they seem to have moved on from the classics and are remaking the more scatteredly beloved also-rans, maybe it's only a matter of time until they get to Frightmare. Frightmare, guys? Yoo-hoo! (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |