
The Hills Have Eyes (2006, DVD)
Review created: 01/09/08(updated 01/09/08)

For a few years in the 1970s, horror films occupied their own unhinged, blood-soaked Wild West zone. Made in the shadow of Charles Manson and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they became low-budget godless nightmares, with the mystical terrors of old shoved aside in favor of redneck cannibals, rusty power tools, girls in cutoffs getting their limbs cut off, and the trés counterculture image of the American nuclear family under siege. I still remember watching The Hills Have Eyes at a drive-in, and the low-budget grunginess of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker was integral to its effect; it told you that the film came from outside the system, that it was made with a lack of restriction — on violence, and on imagination, too — that big-studio horror didn't share.
The remake of The Hills Have Eyes is big-studio horror. Set in the New Mexico desert, it features lots of lavish camera movement and dusty compositions out of early Spielberg, plus a nifty, unsettling credit montage of nuclear-test footage set to a corny country song and intercut with brutal shock images of birth defects. (Yes, folks, it's a message movie.) Produced by Craven, The Hills Have Eyes follows the original closely. A fractious family, whose members include Lost's Emilie de Ravin and the gifted Aaron Stanford from Tadpole, move to California in a station wagon joined to a camper and, once again, are stranded in the desert by a broken axle.
I'm not going to say anything more to give away to the people who live there in the hills. But a must see movie if you are into GORE AND LIMBS BEING SEVERED...
It is very well put together..
{Mrs Puman}
Review ID: 10000000005080424

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