The Hills Have Eyes
dir. Alexandre Aja
Fox Searchlight Pictures

A few years ago, a writer-friend of mine found a producer for a horror script that even he laughed at. His high-concept tag was "The Big Chill meets Night of the Living Dead." He joked about calling it "Die Yuppie! Die!" but it became instead Infested. It was a darling of those critics equipped with irony, but, judging from the fulminating viewer comments at IMDb, roundly hated by the average horror-DVD renter.

In the very same emotional key, but with 15 times the budget, Alexandre Aja has now brought us a remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes. Aja is a young French director, who broke out in 2003 with the gorefest thriller Haute tension. His father is another French director, and his mother's a French film critic, so naturally he brings a touch of cinema to this horror movie. Still, Aja sticks very close here to the Standard Horror Procedures:

1. Isolate the intended victims (country house, spaceship, ice station, etc.); claustrophobia suggested but optional.
2. Establish tensions within the victim group.
3. Make some victims Darwin-Award clueless; some tough and plucky.
4. Conceal the menacing entity for as long as possible — lots of fragmentary glimpses, shadowy suggestions and watcher's-POV shots.
5. Use sexual titillation to access the audience's gooseable subconscious.
6. Startle the audience with false alarms — stray cats jumping out, etc.
7. Victimize victims in order roughly correlated to their cluelessness.
8. Evil entities must be proficient at playing dead when apparently bettered.

Within this framework, Aja adapts Craven's 1972 classic nimbly, turning it to his own delightfully nefarious purposes. Did I mention he's French? He's thoroughly so, in all that French implies to Bill O'Reilly and his ilk, and he uses this schlocky little film to comment, a la Alexis de Tocqueville, about the state of the American soul. But he also uses it to further his reputation as a shock-movie master, providing both amperage and camp.

The very first scene in The Hills Have Eyes has a young woman rhapsodizing about her kitchen appliances, in footage which looks to date from the "nuclear power will be too cheap to meter" era. Then, as the credits roll, we get a Strangelovian montage of mushroom clouds under a vintage country-western dirge. A caption tells us about the 331 atmospheric tests Uncle Sam conducted and then we cut to the present. A silver-suited team, checking out a still-hot test site, gets pickaxed to death by Something Unseen. Now we can join our group of real victims.

They are the Carter family, on a road trip to California in celebration of Mom and Dad's silver anniversary. Dad is an ex-cop and a gruff Dittohead for whom the trip is the fulfillment of all kind of American-macho fantasies, namely taking the rehabbed Airstream for a ramble through Injun Country with his massive six-shooter at the ready for trouble. (He's ably played by Ted Levine, who has his own special place in the horror pantheon, for one of the most memorable line readings in the genre: "It rubs the lotion on its skin ….") Mom is just June Cleaver on Xanax, although she was once a "hot hippie chick," Dad tells us. The son-in-law is along; he's just All in the Family's Meathead updated, the designated Democrat chafing under Dad's reactionary reign. His beautiful wife is mostly preoccupied with their new baby, and he leers sneakily at the teenaged younger sister. Junior Carter, meanwhile, worries about the family dogs, a pair of SS-quality German shepherds named Beauty and Beast.

Dad's deliberate avoidance of the beaten path gets the family marooned in the New Mexico desert, very near the site of some of those A-bomb tests. Complications ensue, of course, because a family of miners has been living thereabouts for generations. They've suffered the privations of isolation and mutations from the radiation. Now they are a really nasty version of the "nuclear family," prone to rape, robbery and cannibalism. When the two clans cross paths, Beauty, the dog, is the first to go, and very quickly thereafter things devolve into beast vs. beast. The Carters hole up in the Airstream like pioneers awaiting the Apaches, as the mutants in the shadows plot their doom.

The Hills Have Eyes has something for everyone. For the core horror audience it shows off some fine female flesh, and breaks new ground in the realistic depiction of gunshot trauma and other hideous injury. Some of this is a bit distanced by hints of parody; even as one characters gasps out her last, she seems to be visiting a Lemon Pledge commercial. Still the film does an excellent job of jolting the audience periodically, even when they're expecting it. It makes the mutants vile enough so there's a real cathartic lift in their combat with the Carters. And it warms the heart with its celebration of canine loyalty.

For those with a more nuanced sense of things, Hills is a pitch-black comedy, a parody/homage that deconstructs itself as it goes along. Like Robocop and Starship Troopers, the celebrated Trojan horses of director Paul Verhoeven, it revels in commercial tackiness while mocking the jingoism, complacency and corruption of its intended audience, which won't get the jokes. It's all a sort of allegory, a (literally) projected neurosis, very much in the tradition of cold-war horror/monster flicks — complete with subtexts about how we manufacture evil "others" and then manufacture "final solutions" for them.

At one point, the action in Hills creeps through an unblasted "test town," a suburb built to measure A-bomb effects on typical Baby Boom cocoons. It's still stocked with smiling, WASPy test dummies. In one of its living rooms we find a mutant, condemned by his deformities to endlessly vegetate in the glow of network TV. He declares, "You made us what we are." It's a suspenseful, creepy and repellent moment, and also a mocking direct address by the author ("Die Yuppie! Die!"), an indictment of the culture universalized by the one absolute superpower. This might account for the manic gusto with which Aja sends his American suburbanites to their demise.

None of the folks in the megaplex where I saw Hills took patriotic umbrage over any of this — even when the American flag becomes an instrument of murder. Hardly any of them got the jokes either. But they were viscerally involved, offering a rising chorus of unsolicited advice to the Carters. And they applauded gladly when it was all over. I'm sure Aja is laughing all the way to the bank.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)