The Hills Have Eyes (1977; two and a half stars total) One of my pet peeves is when movies claim to be set in New Mexico but they show a saguaro cactus, which is native to Arizona. I grew up around the counties where Billy the Kid rode and there's no saguaro cacti in those parts. I understand that most people assume there's nothing in New Mexico but aliens in Roswell and nuclear fallout around White Sands Missile Range. I even had a roommate once tell me that he didn't believe people really lived in New Mexico. He thought the whole area was storage space for government conspiracies and fenced off from the general public. For the record, Roswell shares nothing in common with Nevada's Area 51 and New Mexico doesn't all look like White Sands. Fortunately, The Hills Have Eyes doesn't claim to be set in New Mexico and then show saguaro cacti. Unfortunately, the remake (see below) tries to make White Sands into its own version of Area 51. Compared to Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), the cannibal mutant mining community in the original only look as freaky as their biker/caveman costumes. The freakiest shot in the movie is of a baby laying in its crib looking scared. Put a child, especially a baby, in any horror movie and it's automatically scarier. It may not be more ethical, but it will definitely have more tension. Add a creepy gas station attendant and it's perfect, right? Well, maybe not perfect, but it's high concept for sure. A family of beautiful people that wouldn't run over a jackrabbit at the beginning of the movie are stabbing and setting fire to people by the end. That part is novel, but their booby traps are more ridiculous than ones in Last House on the Left (1972) and the blood looks like Dairy Queen's cherry topping for ice cream cones. The second half is mostly shot in the dark and the dog gets the most of the credit for saving the day. Come to think of it, wouldn't Lassie vs. Radioactive Hillbillys have made a great title?The Hills Have Eyes (2006; three stars total) I feel the same about movie remakes as I do about song covers (you can see a list of my favorites for the latter on my 3/10/09 post). If you're going to do something different, then really DO something different. I like string quartet tributes to heavy metal bands, hip hop sampling, house remixes and reggae versions of nearly anything. The Hills Have Eyes remake follows the plot of the original pretty closely but amps up the gore to focus on mutations from nuclear fallout. Birth defects like strabismus (misalignment of the eyes), cleft lips and elephantiasis are taken to the extreme and exploited. There's more character drama between the parents and the children, especially the father and his son-in-law, and between the teenage brother and sister. In the remake, this family is already on a vacation from hell before they even stop for gas. But before I make it sound like there's just more of everything, allow me to refer you to the gas station attendant and his illegitimate granddaughter, Ruby. In the original, those two characters are understandably trying to escape their situation and save the other family as well. This made the death of the gas station attendant so much more dramatic than Ruby's self-sacrifice in the remake, and it sure beats newspaper clippings for explaining how the characters are connected. The gas station attendant would've been better left as a tragic hero. In olde Europe, it was fairies, trolls or elves that would come in the night to replace your baby with a changeling, and while The Hills Have Eyes movie makes no reference to changelings, both their legend and this movie series are cautionary tales against inbreeding. I'd never heard of Sawney Bean until after I watched the movie, but apparently The Hills Have Eyes is a modern retelling of this 16th-century, Scottish legend about incest and cannibals. Both the clan in the legend in the mutant family in the movie live underground, but talk about doing something really different with an adaptation/remake!
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