Don't bother looking into "The Hills Have Eyes" if you're faint of heart. The second half of this remake of the 1973 Wes Craven cult classic is Intense, with a capital "I."
The first half of the film was such fill-in-the-blank, horror-flick banality that viewers are blindsided when the plot suddenly shifted from "let's wait and see who's gruesomely killed next" to "this is war."
What comes to mind is the Schwarzenegger classic "Predator," in which the final act pits Arnold against the alien hunter, one-on-one, Arnold's wits against the monster's superior firepower and technology (not to mention physical prowess). Substitute an unlucky suburban family traveling through the New Mexico desert for Arnold, and a murderous band of mutated savages for the predator, and you've got the second act of "The Hills Have Eyes."
The formula in "Hills" is by no means avant-garde: strand, outnumber and terrorize a small family (or otherwise tight-knit group) until the survivors are finally pushed beyond the brink of humanity and resort to combating savagery with savagery. Nonetheless, when this formula is employed deftly -- as it is in this film -- it produces breathtaking thrills and applause-worthy triumphs.
Nothing is more satisfying, in this brand of movie, than seeing a grotesque subhuman -- who at one point holds a cocked pistol to a newborns head and forces the mother to nurse him -- finally get the business-end of an axe to the face.
If you're not the kind of viewer who can sympathize with the cinematic pleasure I derive from such an event, I repeat myself: this is not the film for you. By the final credits, the unlikely hero of "Hills" is so beat-to-crap and covered-in-blood (a mere quarter of it is his own) that he's virtually unrecognizable. And trust me: he earns this blood, and the filmmakers don't shy away from portraying a single splatter.
It's also worth mentioning the tongue-in-cheek brand of violence (think Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" and George E. Romero's "Zombie Trilogy") that director Alexandre Aja realizes in one particularly effective scene: after a long, brutal scrap with the biggest of the savages, the hero defiantly places his shattered spectacles back on his face. It's a self-conscious moment on the film's part -- as if to remind viewers, "Sure, this stuff is sick, but it's all in the name of fun!"
It's worth stomaching the obligatory first half of "The Hills Have Eyes" to get to the delicious second-half thrills.
"The Hills Have Eyes", Rated R for strong gruesome violence and terror throughout, and for language, opened nationwide on Friday, March 10.
