Hills Have Eyes

OK, I tried to fight it. Even as my brother and my girlfriend insisted that I was wrong, I tried to defend this movie. I wanted to like it, I wanted to believe that today’s filmmakers can’t possibly be so incompetent as to destroy an entire movie with one horribly dumb ending.

I was wrong. At the end of the day, the Hills Have Eyes but they lack a heart and brain. This film needs to see the Wizard desperately. The sad part is that it really could have been good. The premise was interesting enough if not terribly unique. It’s sort of a period piece—a throwback to the days when kids still ducked under their desks during air raid drills, when a mothers fears of nuclear annihilation for her children ranked above her fears of measles, mumps and fast women. See, the US governments testing of nuclear devices in the desert has created a family of mutated, deformed and homicidal freaks. The movie intends to give them some cognizance, at one point having a mutant assert this is all revenge for the 1950’s era testing that ruined his people. That’s a pointless and half-hearted effort at best. It would have been better to dispense with the motivations that we all could have guessed at anyway and just gotten on with the business of killing.

See, if you’re going to give your twisted, scarred, mutated character a voice and make him explain himself, then it has to be a good explanation. Show us he is a feeling character and makes us empathize a little. Make him intelligent and let the audience know that he’s been turned into a monster but inside there is a rational, albeit angry, human being. Don’t just make him throw his lopsided head around and utter some stupid one-liner about seeking revenge for something that happened 60 years ago. See, no matter how you cut it the revenge is being perpetrated on innocent people who didn’t commit the act in question and the fact that this freak attempts to justify it like this serves to remove the notion that is a mindless homicidal monster and inserts the notion that he’s just dumb. That’s far less scary, isn’t it?

Let’s not forget that his merry band also eats birds and attempts the raping of the family daughter. So, revenge isn’t entirely the motivations here.

The movie just seems to forget what it is somewhere along the line. It’s a campy sort of horror fest with a 1950’s b-rate feel to it. But the movie thinks it’s a horror classic with a unique premise, serious acting and directing and some smattering of social consciousness. It’s not. This movie is like the fat girl that thinks her new prom dress makes her hot. It doesn’t and walking around pretending your hot just makes you look foolish.

The Hills Have Eyes suffers from an identity crisis. It seems the filmmakers have forgotten that slew of inbred-killer-freak movies have been made in recent years and to stand out you need to be better than they were. And different. By different I don’t mean just adding the worlds worst ending.

I don’t want to give it away because some of you might spurn my suggestion and go see this anyway. Suffice it to say that a room full of idiots would have seen this ending coming. Let’s say, for example, this movie was being screened at the Kennedy compound. The drunken swaying and random breast grabbing would have stopped long enough for Ted to utter,”Errgh, aaaaaah….burp.” That means, 'can you believed he dropped that gun right there? How dumb is this guy? Who wrote this crap? How old are you young lady? Ok, that’s old enough, let’s see ‘em.'

Ooops, I guess I tipped my hat to the ending after all. Well, somethings gotta be unpredictable now and then.