The Hills Have Eyes Review

Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes has provoked in me the very special type of anger I reserve for well made films crafted by seemingly intelligent people who really should know better. That it is powerful, visceral film making is undeniable. On a technical level it is nearly flawless. However it is also deeply banal, utterly pointless and violently misanthropic. This is a film that wants you to be entertained by pain and degradation.

Spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

For those unaware of the basic set up, it goes like this. When the United States government was conducting nuclear tests in the New Mexico deserts they forcibly removed the local residents, all except for a small band who took refuge in the nearby mines and refused to leave their land. Decades later that small band of survivors has been horribly deformed by radiation and survive by preying upon passing travellers, aided in this by the owner of a remote gas station. A three generation family - parents, children, a child's spouse, and an infant grand daughter - fall into their trap while on vacation and are tormented, tortured, raped and killed before finally turning the tables and bringing death down on their tormentors. Evidently Craven's original - which I freely confess to not having seen, never really having had a Craven phase - was layered with a decent amount of subtext and commentary. This has none.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with an unrepentant gore film and Aja starts off well on that front with a fantastic introductory set piece that involves radiation testers being swung hither and yon while impaled on the end of a pick axe. It's a flagrantly excessive piece of work filled with style and a goofy sense of fun that bodes well for what is to come but Aja unfortunately feels the need to turn from that wonky excess into entirely darker and more realistic scenarios.

The tide turns for the film in a sequence that sees - in rapid order - a man graphically and realistically burned alive, the extended multiple rape of a teenaged girl, and the terrorizing of an infant child who looks to be about nine months old, possibly less. The core problem here is not the content but the fact that it is played uniformly for thrills. This is not meant to horrify, but to get the adrenaline flowing. The burning sequence is shocking but works within the context of what has come before; to call playing a rape scene for entertainment value problematic is beyond understatement; to work a screaming, terrified infant for thrills is utterly unacceptable. Up until this point the film has been adults freely playing a nasty game of make believe but the instant Aja introduces that terrified child and holds a gun to its head the illusion is shattered beyond repair and all that's left is a sense of disgust that we are meant to be entertained by this.

Now, you may well be asking how it is that a site - and a reviewer - that came out positively on Eli Roth's Hostel, a film that this will inevitably be compared to, can possibly be so negative on Aja's film. Good question, and the answer is simple. Roth's film is based entirely on the premise that you will be horrified by the devaluation of human life it presents. Roth is counting on that one simple fact and the entire film would fall apart were that not the case. You are meant to be outraged, you are meant to feel that however big an idiot the lead character is nobody deserves what is being done to him. But The Hills Have Eyes doesn't want you to be horrified, it wants you to revel in the degradation and that is an enormous difference.

A commenter in another Hills thread on this site made the point that he couldn't quite see the characters as anything other than meat. He is absolutely correct. That is all any of them are for Aja, nothing but grist for the mill and the result is a film all the more odious for the fact that it is so well made.