The Hills Have Eyes - Forgetting History

Apr

15

The Hills Have Eyes - Forgetting History

≡ Category: Action, Horror, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense, United States, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Horror/ Suspense/ Action
Director: Alexandre Aja
Year: 2006

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

Writer/director Alexandre Aja’s update to Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes is an improvement over recent horror movie remakes, or for that matter Aja’s first film, High Tension, but it’s oddly unengaging.

Aja, along with his cowriter Grégory Levasseur, have a lot of good ideas. As Frenchmen, they have an outsider’s insight into America. They understand our capacity as a culture to forget our own history, to pursue progress blindly, to marginalize life’s losers.

To this end, Aja and Levasseur layer on a subplot which immeasurably enriches their story. It seems that when the U.S. Government was bent on performing nuclear tests in the New Mexico desert, a community of miners refused to leave their homes. The government razed their village, but the stubborn miners simply retreated into the mining caves. The government went ahead with their tests, and the miners were forgotten.

Now, these same miners have become mutants, preying on the odd travelers passing through.

Aja threads the theme of the nuclear tests throughout the picture. He places the dump site of the various victims’ vehicles inside of a crater formed by a nuclear blast. Much of the action is set inside a faux town built by the U.S. Government as part of the nuclear testing program, complete with department store dummies — creepy.

The way he’s visualized the mutants is also smart. Aja extrapolates from documented photos of Hiroshima victims and the like. The clothes that the mutants wear are a combination of rags and hand me downs scavenged from their victims.

But how do Aja and Levasseur fare with characterization?

The Carters are a normal middleclass family, doing the family thing in a cross country drive in an Airstream camper. Patriarch Big Bob (Ted Levine) is a retired cop and never misses the chance to rag on his son-in-law, Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford), a Democratic pacifist type who hates guns. Big Bob’s wife Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) was a hippy chick back in the day. Doug and his wife, Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) have a newborn baby. There’s also the requisite bored and sullen teenagers, Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) and Bobby (Dan Byrd). Two German shepherds are along for the ride.

Aja and Levasseur do a pretty good job making these characters into identifiable individuals, instead of the more typical meat on a stick we’re used to in a standard horror film.

The mutants are individuals, too. This isn’t so much a result of writing as casting. Aja had the wit to cast great actors like Billy Drago and Robert Joy in these roles. Joy is particularly ferocious.

As a director, Aja doesn’t do the PG-13 dance, watering down the gore to increase box office returns. The Hills Have Eyes is no-holds horror. As we saw from his previous film, High Tension, Aja has a talent for action and gruesome imagery, and he doesn’t disappoint here.

So, what’s the problem?

First of all, Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur make their characters unnecessarily stupid. Yes, if an average middleclass family was stranded in the middle of the New Mexico desert, they would be initially confused and disoriented. But if Aja wants us to identify with and root for these people, they can’t repeatedly make foolish decisions.

I was especially disappointed in Bukowski. He’s already seen the mutants kill several members of his family. They’ve kidnapped someone near and dear to him. I know Bukowski’s supposed to be a pacifist, but hesitating to kill at this point just makes him look like a weenie. And did he have to run away when one of the German shepherds comes to his aid while a mutant is attacking him? It makes him look morally weak.

Insisting on the stupidity of the characters also lets Aja off the hook as a writer. If our heroes were competent, it would force Aja to be more clever in his plotting.

There are also problems with consistency. In the prologue, the mutants seem to have superhuman strength. But as we find out later, they have severe physical problems brought about by radiation. This is more realistic.

As competent as The Hills Have Eyes frequently is, by the end, I just shrugged. Aja squanders the good will he creates by the nuclear testing narrative and his vigorous handling of the action sequences. Given the basic scenario Aja and Levasseur came up with, I should have been digging divots into my palms with my nails. But by making his protagonists foolish and weak (both physically and morally), he drains away the rooting interest which would have given the movie untold power.