NUCLEAR FAMILIES, CRAVEN INTENTIONS : Alexandre Aja’s ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ [6/10]

The fate of the film's two dogs tells you all you need to know about this new Hills Have Eyes: the German Shepherd named 'Beauty' perishes in gruesome fashion; her playmate 'Beast' (after develops a taste for human flesh) lives to fight another day. Updating Wes Craven's 1979 original, French director Aja serves up an ostentatiously nasty, not-for-the-squeamish, stripped-down picture that's something of an ordeal for characters, actors, and audiences alike (and will no doubt form a future double-bill partner with Rob Zombie's similarly old-school, seventies-hommaging The Devil's Rejects.)

Aja and scriptwriter Gregory Levasseur are pretty faithful to many aspects of their source: in a remote corner of the American west (for which dusty Morocco convincingly doubles), an extended family is lured off the highway and into the clutches of a clan left mutant and deformed by 1950s nuclear testing. As the poster puts it, "the lucky ones die first" – leaving the survivors initially traumatised, and then consumed by a bloodthirsty revenge. There's also a surprising amount of Straw Dogs stirred into the mix here – the most obvious visual homage coming when pacifistic nice-guy Doug (Aaron Stanford) puts on his spectacles despite one lens having been shattered into pieces (a variation on the memorable poster-art for Sam Peckinpah's 1971 envelope-pusher).

But as Doug pursues his one-man war against the freaks who grinningly offed his wife and in-laws, there's never any doubt as to who the good-guys and bad-guys are. Even when we're introduced to the most physically unfortunate member of the mutant clan – the wheelchair-bound, grossly hydrocephalic 'Big Brain' (Desmond Askew) – he soon reveals himself as being as vicious as venal as the rest of his amoral, flesh-munching kin, and thus deserving of his grisly fate at Beast's eager jaws.

Chief among the Wrong Turn-ish nasties is the leprechaun-like 'Lizard' – played with eye-rolling relish by Robert Joy, back in the world of face-mangling prosthetics after his rather more sympathetic turn in George Romero's Land of the Dead. As in the Romero quasi-epic, the political angles of The Hills Have Eyes aren't exactly delivered with subtletly or restraint: the contrast between the Democrat-voting Doug and his educated-redneck father-in-law 'Big Bob' (Ted Levine) is a source of much comic relief in the early stages, and later on there's much inventive use made of a miniature American-flag prop (or, to be more precise, the flag's lethally sharp miniature  'pole'). The whole nuclear-testing angle is, of course, an indictment of governmental callousness – the hillbillies are both villains and victims of what is, by implication, a rather more calculating and callous form of evildoing.

But these intriguing subcurrents are really little more than windowdressing: as in his international breakthrough Haut tension (aka Switchblade Romance), Aja is primarily concerned with building up suspense before plunging us deep into the messiest bloodbath imaginable. For all the technical skill on show in Haut tension, however, the picture was ultimately undone by its infuriatingly clever-clever final "twist". With The Hills Have Eyes, Aja and Levasseur thankfully resist any such rug-pulling: after a rather slow opening act, the picture clicks into gear around the halfway stage and, despite a couple of saggy down-time moments, builds nicely to the full-tilt finale. Barrelled along by Tomandandy's doomy, poundingly atmospheric score, the picture delivers an absorbing (if ultimately somewhat inconsequential) catalogue of scares, jolts and general, bracing unpleasantness.

Neil Young
5th April, 2006

THE HILLS HAVE EYES : [6/10] : USA 2006 : Alexandre AJA : 107 mins (BBFC timing)seen at Cineworld cinema, Boldon, South Tyneside (UK), 24th March 2006 – public show