At first glance, it seems that this appalling remake has no raison d'être other than Hollywoodian avariciousness. Sporting nearly identical villains, locales and narrative threads, it feels like a glossy reproduction of the original rather than an honest reworking. And while the slick new production values allow for more realistic monstrosity and elaborate new sets, they remain purely cosmetic updates on what is now a truly tired premise. It's only when the viewer lingers on the film's radical new politics of exclusion and chauvinism that the project finally finds meaning. And so the illusion of uselessness vanishes to reveal something much worse: pamphleteering hatred disguised as entertainment.
For me, the very idea of this new Hills Have Eyes meant a double blow to the head, being at once a travesty of Wes Craven's gritty source material and an irresistible bait for beloved director Alexandra Aja. Flown in from France only to unearth and gloss over a dusty old cult item, the man behind the unforgettable Haute Tension had thus become yet another money-making cog in the Hollywoodian sausage machine. It's a real shame too, since his entire creative team (complete with returning collaborators Grégory Levasseur and Baxter) were now hired as thoughtless restorers, repackaging cheap old material for profitable resale, but draining all its life energy in the process. Here, the crisp photography and princely art direction contribute only to evacuate the original film's glib atmosphere, creating a shimmering spectacle out of what was a raw expression of horror. The same can be said about the slick new "fallout" mutants, unsightly creatures meant to elicit immediate hatred and the convenient signifiers of an historical mistake that needs to be undone. Fitted with a brutal new introduction, but deprived of some crucial later screen time, these monstrous new antagonists are a mere visual aid to help convey the film's apology of war-mongering hatred. Concision is also sacrificed here as this new version runs almost 20 minutes longer to include an intricate new finale that grotesquely hammers home its heinous contentions about the enemies of America. In fact, the entire exaltation of retaliatory violence conveyed by Aja's film comes in stark contrast with Craven's initial condemnation thereof, making the two iterations not twins but complete opposites.
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| Mutants are people too, y'know... |
You should know exactly what to expect from this heap of garbage even before the opening credits start to roll. In their infinite misanthropy, the producers have indeed judged it necessary to tack on a new introduction allowing them to exalt physical determinism in order to ease us into their Manichean outlook on life. If one recalls the introductory shot of Craven's film, he will simply be reminded of silent hills at dusk, the intricacies of which merely hint at the presence of lurking monsters. And while it is crudely filmed, there's a certain subtlety to it, which is found completely lacking in the remake. Here, we are actually shown a white on black title card that reads:
"Between 1945 and 1962 the United States conducted 331 atmospheric nuclear tests. Today, the government still denies the genetic effects caused by the radioactive fallout..."
And as if that ominous warning was not sufficient to let us in on the overdetermined nature of the new "eyes in the hills", the following scene features a bunch of health officials in bio-hazard suits being brutally attacked by a hulking mutant wielding a pickaxe. Puncturing their flesh with the heavy steel pick, the villain then proceeds to lift their carcasses up above his head and smash them against rocks. While this sequence vies to provide the viewer with additional information about the film's antagonists, it actually obscures any attempt at a deeper understanding of their plight, using instead the dubious equation of monstrosity and nefariousness to pin them down as unrepentant antagonists. This point is hammered home with some evocative opening credits featuring archive footage of mushroom clouds and mutated fetuses. And while these images contribute to the film's overarching misanthropy by promoting physical determinism with the help of grating sound effects complementing the parade, their sheer pictorial quality leaves a lasting impression as a true testament to the horrors of nuclear warfare. And since they constitute the only novelty on display before the climactic confrontation, you might actually want to hang on to these images and cherish them.
After the credits, we are immediately thrown back unto the beaten path, with a strikingly similar Carter family halting their cross-country journey in a strikingly similar gas station as Craven's. And although the slick photography now gives a glamorous feel to the surrounding dirt roads and back houses, we feel right at home with what appears to be a returning cast of characters from a popular sitcom. I'm sure you remember the Carter family from before: Bob, Ethel, Lynn, Brenda, Bobby, Doug and their two dogs, Beauty and Beast, celebrating the parents' silver anniversary by going to California (and incidentally passing through the murderous New Mexico hills). The characters' names and their personas haven't changed much since the original film. The only difference is the fact that Lynn has now kept her maiden name after marrying Doug, remaining Lynn Carter instead of becoming Lynn Bukowski. Portrayed by a new cast of jobbers and TV actors (plus Ted Levine, whom I hardly recognized as the magnum-totting macho patriarch), these returning characters soon partake in a strikingly similar ordeal as their precursors. After deciding to take a dirt road through the hills, their trailer is ambushed and they are left stranded in inhospitable surroundings filled with prying mountain dwellers. When these unsightly barbarians brutally attack them, killing three and kidnapping Lynn and Doug's baby, the Carters rise up and decide to impose a similar brand of barbarity on their tormentors. In a nutshell, same family encounters same mutants in the same circumstances, leaving the horror fan biding his time until the final showdown in a decrepit fall-out town full of mutants. As for the slight variations in the story, they fail to alter the narrative progression significantly as they merely promote a sickly new angle from which to view pre-existing material.
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| Which version are we watching now? |
If the present film is enlightening in any regard, it is with the spectacle of its ridiculous production history. Budgeted at 15,000,000$, roughly 60 times the amount it took to produce the original, this rich new remake perfectly exemplifies the shocking policies of Hollywoodian spend-o-crats. I mean, the film was shot in Morocco of all places! Morocco! What? Wasn't there any room left to shoot in New Mexico? Had promoters just bought the last stretch of land from California to Kansas? Perhaps it was that the producers couldn't find the ideal location to encompass their perfect vision of a mutant-led massacre. But then, couldn't they simply alter the screenplay instead of moving the entire film crew across the Atlantic? It's madness! And we're not talking about a naturalistic period piece here; we're talking about a shock-based horror film! I know this request to be futile, but couldn't B-series film be outfitted with B-series budgets? Doesn't that sound like a sound business decision?
I couldn't wrap my head around this at first. I couldn't think of any sound excuse to justify on-location shooting in Morocco. But then the dirty word "monopoly" came to mind, that is the possibility to spend money as absurdly as possible without ever risking to lose ground to your competitors. Such a warped conception of the free market economy is shockingly un-American, but then so is the widespread slavery to glamorous brand names that will keep Hollywood alive despite all of its past and future shortcomings. Personally, I think that promoting low-budget productions would be a fine way for Hollywood to recoup its losses from box office flops, further creating a pool of creative young talent to insure its sustainability. Just like in the good old days. For that to happen however, studio executives would have to relinquish some control over their productions and promote a diversity of styles and techniques, thus compromising the efforts of their marketing experts. But that will never happen. Not only is there no willingness to do so on the part of power-hungry studio heads, but there is no proper motivation either, since Hollywood is now "too big to fail" and remains completely untouched by the possibility of an eventual failure (government handouts being an easy and readily available solution in that event).
In the present case, a smaller crew working with natural settings could've easily done a better job at conveying horror and dread than the inflexible battalion actually at work on the project. And while big budgets and subsequent studio interference are obviously detrimental to the efficiency of any exploitation film, the very notion of "exploitation" tends to erode with the poisonous advent of political correctness. Actually, the staples of exploitation cinema are now being neutered and incorporated directly into the mainstream. This is exemplified by the recent apparition of the "torture porn" sub-genre. Absent from our vocabulary a mere twenty years back, this evocative new expression sums up both the exploitative nature and the viability of this new trend as a commercial product. With the present film, we are given true insight as to the genre's actual power as object of mass consumption. Fitted with an underlying political message meant to aggressively stimulate the disintegrating patriotic fiber of bleeding-heart "liberals", the film was obviously made to corral as many viewers as possible under the banner of unabashed brutality. Hence it's polished look and vast marketing campaign. After all, everybody needs a glossy war poster for inspiration. Right?
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Patriotic stabbings are a sure cure for left-wing apathy:
The Hills Have Eyes as war propaganda.
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Faced with such a soulless rehash, I found that using the war propaganda angle was actually the most satisfying way to give the film purpose and to analyze its dubious iconography. And while some may disagree with such a claim, the film contains ample evidence to support it, the search for which is the only worthy intellectual gymnastics allowed by this sorry exercise in repetition. Released in March 2006, as support for the war in Iraq was hitting a nearly unprecedented low of 42%, the film uses crude metaphors and the spectacle of primitive violence to elicit vengeful thoughts against the new enemies of the state, vying to stir up old passions amongst those who need it the most: Democrat pussies. Aside from the fact that the villains here are all mountain-dwelling guerilla fighters, the new screenplay contains a plethora of minute, but revealing updates meant to support a pro-war agenda:
a) The new opening scene. By equating physical difference with wickedness, the film crudely suggests that evil is only skin-deep, a simple matter of genetic differences between individuals. And while this straightforward sequence promotes a certain disdain for anything foreign, it also addresses the more revealing issue of American-made monstrosity. Being the result of military testing during the Cold War, the mutants here are the direct product of anti-Soviet American efforts. Which is exactly the same as Osama bin Laden and his clique, former Mujahideen fighters sponsored by the CIA to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan (as seen in Rambo III, another propaganda film meant to promote American interventionism abroad). And now, the mistakes of the past have come back to haunt us, and they need to be violently undone.
b) The premeditated nature of the Carters' accident. In Craven's film, Bob Carter insists on taking the scenic route through the hills and subsequently loses control of his vehicle during an argument with his wife. In the new version, the Carters are lured away from the main road by a cunning gas attendant, and their car is ambushed by the family of mutants. Thus, the antagonists' actions are now fully premeditated, and not simply circumstantial, leaving absolutely no nuance as to their nefarious intentions. Such a Manichean new outlook on the initial attack subsequently greatly helps warrant the Carters' retaliatory strike.
c) Doug's new left-wing persona. Being described onscreen as a left-wing "pussy" and thoroughly despised by tough patriarch Bob, son-in-law Doug is now characterized as a liberal softie. Mocked for his reverent attitude toward his wife (the man is said to have lost his balls to her) and his lack of proficiency with firearms, Doug has become a grotesque parody of Yankee war protesters. And while he eventually finds redemption, it is only through primitive violence, "evolving" into the blood-soaked mass murderer of the final scene and "heroic" defender of traditional American values (family and country). This new iconography allows the film to question the actual moral rectitude of left-wing activists by confronting them with the perspective of foreign violence hitting home, their subsequent contention being that any human being would readily take arms to avenge the brutal death of his own family. Previously explored in Death Wish (1974) and other such conservative genre efforts, this intriguing idea is herein meant as a rallying cry for well-thinking, but uninvolved "liberals" who protest the war from a comfortable distance without grasping its more primitive origins.
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| The left-wing peace activist as "debunked" by the people at beforeitsnews.com, where godsent dreams are regarded as facts... |
d) The new finale. Set in a nuclear test town from the 1950s, the climactic confrontation between Doug and the antagonistic mutants does not provide mere narrative closure, but a symbolic cleansing of hallowed ground. Featuring dusty old homesteads populated by limbless mannequins arranged in typical family scenes, the makeshift town has become a grotesque parody of Americana under the rule of the mutants, who mock tradition by transforming dinner tables in ghoulish canvas of rotting human flesh, making raunchy sculptures from disarticulated mannequins, filling meat lockers with pickled limbs, even cynically intoning the Star-Spangled Banner. Such shocking defilement is fortunately punished accordingly, with the death sentence happily carried out by shotgun-totting Doug and the Carter family dog, another traditional symbol and defender of American values.
e) The new ending. Contrary to the first, this new ending actually glamorizes the violence perpetrated by the protagonist. Originally comprised of a disturbing fade to red following a shot of Doug's distorted features as he clubs the last villain to death, the final few frames of the film now boast heroic trumpets sounding the return of the battered hero as he emerges from a wall of flames after vanquishing all the desert-dwelling mutants who threatened his family. This radical change in imagery provides the most salient break with the source material, which equated the protagonists' violence with that of the antagonists. Here, the protagonists' violence is validated by the antagonists', making the rationale of retaliatory war completely unproblematic.
f) The American flag. One of the most blatant new symbols in the film is the small American flag mounted on the Carter's truck. Stolen from the vehicle by the mutants and later stuck in the cranium of carbonized patriarch Bob in a grotesque mockery of his values, this flag is thus symbolically defiled by infidels. Luckily, it is later re-appropriated by Doug, and used to puncture the throat of an enemy, thus reclaiming its rightful place as defender of American values.
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| Restoring the veneer of the American flag is reason enough to join the warpath. (This image was taken from right-wing blog Moonbattery.com where you can learn more about the treacherous nature of the American left-wing). |
By using all of its narrative updates to promote the War on Terror, this reprehensible remake actually finds another function than its ability to generate money out of thin air, becoming a temporary war poster, but a lasting example of Hollywood's appropriation of dissident discourse. Yesterday, "exploitation" was a way for radical new voices to showcase the true extent of our freedom of speech, depicting violence not as something glamorous and romantic, but as something raw and primitive. During that era, young filmmakers used exploitation to show that revenge is a coin with two identical sides. Craven's The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes as well as other (rape-) revenge classics such as I Spit on your Grave (1978) made a direct equation of both the protagonists' and antagonists' barbarity, cleverly confronting us with the horror and uselessness of retaliatory violence and challenging our preconceptions about the actual worth of violence. Today, as exploitation is slowly seeping into mainstream culture, its aims are now regulated by the powers that be, causing the disappearance of such cautionary tales and the advent of a purely Manichean paradigm from which the roots of hatred can spring forth unchallenged.
1/5 Nearly identical to the original, the present remake brings nothing new to the table but a disturbing misanthropy.
