‘Hills
Have Eyes’ typical horror movie
By
Dylana Foy
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer
A horror film remade, whether it was done well or not, can still be scary.
Watching a family getting tortured, killed and burned is part of the experience
one might expect while watching a horror film, and if that is all you want
out of the newly remade “The Hills Have Eyes,” then it is the perfect
film for you.
“
The Hills Have Eyes” is a remake of the 1977 cult classic, originally
by famed horror director Wes Craven (of the Scream trilogy, A Nightmare on
Elm Street, Red Eye), who produces this new film.
The film, by writer/director Alexandre Aja, follows the original plot fairly
closely. Both the original and remake are about a family of tourists who get
stranded in the desert and are attacked by human mutants. The major difference
is that in the original, the mutants were just scary beasts, and in the new
film, they are humans that have been altered by a nuclear blast.
The story begins with an ordinary family on a road trip through the desert
on their way to San Diego. In the movie every family member serves an obvious
purpose in his or her role.
The father (Ted Levine), who leads the family into the desert instead of taking
a more practical path, is a conservative ex-cop who doesn’t get along
with his son-in-law.
The mother (Kathleen Quinlan), is a free spirit in love with her family. There
are two teenagers, including a sexy younger daughter (Emile de Ravin), and
a dorky son trying to act grown up (Dan Byrd). There is also the eldest daughter/new
mother (Vinessa Shaw), her husband (Aaron Stafford), a wimpy geek who doesn’t
like the desert; and their baby daughter, the innocent one most often in danger,
putting the audience on the edge of their seats hoping she won’t die.
When the family gets ambushed in the middle of the desert we see them struggle
to save their lives, and the lives of their other family members.
The fate of the family ends up falling on the two weakest characters (Byrd
and Stafford).
The mutants are extremely scary, and have quite a taste for blood, but one
can’t help feeling a little sorry for them. So they are evil, and apparently
they deserve to die, but it’s not entirely their fault.
The town they live in is shown as once being a quaint mining town full of loving
families. Then, of course, the government decided to use the area to test nuclear
bombs. Now, those who survived are out for revenge. At one point, one of the
mutants even says, “You’ve made us what we’ve become.”
In the end, “The Hills Have Eyes” was like a typical scary movie
with the good, the bad, the deformed, and lots of blood to go around.
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