Mutilating Mr. Bean

The Hills Have Eyes

The New York Sun, March 10, 2006

To understand the origins of the mutant mayhem that is Alexandre Aja's new version of "The Hills Have Eyes," it helps to begin with a detour into the old, nasty Scottish legend, the legend of Sawney Bean. Like the finest old, nasty Scottish legends, it's certainly old, probably bogus, and undoubtedly nasty. Sawney, it's said, was a brigand who lived in a cave with a large, feral, and incestuous brood that only emerged from their lair to rob, murder, and, well, eat, innocent passers-by, unseemly behavior even in Scotland, a country not noted for its refined cuisine.

Many hundred years later, Wes Craven, a young American filmmaker then known mainly for "The Last House on the Left" (1972), a sleazy and regrettably sadistic slasher pic (inspired by, of all things, a Bergman movie) decided to update Sawney's savage saga for an America that was already, you would think, more than sufficiently traumatized by the fall of Saigon, the rise of Jimmy Carter, and the persistence of disco. The result, the original "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977), was a bloody, if exuberantly directed, mess of gore, the grotesque, the glib, and the gloating, marked by graveyard humor, graveyard acting, a crucifixion, a corpse used as bait, cruelty to dogs, cruelty to a parakeet, cruelty to an old codger, cruelty to a young mother, cruelty to a retired cop, and way, way too many people eyeing a "tenderloin" of baby as the source of a good dinner.

Over in ancient Ayrshire, Sawney and his clan were, so the story goes, eventually caught and made to pay a high price for their meals (limbs lopped off, left to bleed to death, burned alive, the usual). By contrast, Mr. Craven's orgy of murder and cannibalism brought him fame and box office success, and paved the way for a career that introduced us to, among others, Freddy Krueger ("A Nightmare on Elm Street"), a bunch of frightening cellar dwellers with a left-wing message ("The People Under the Stairs"), and, most sickening of all, the spectacle of Meryl Streep (in 1999's "Music of the Heart") as an inspirational inner-city teacher. Accused by some of dumbing down the horror genre, Mr. Craven is praised by others for smartening it up ("Wes Craven's New Nightmare," and all those "Screams"). He has become a brand ("Wes Craven Presents ..."), a sage, a self-congratulatory icon, and a cult, and there's every reason to think his devotees will be thrilled by what they find lurking in the new "Hills."

This time around, Mr. Craven is only a producer, but the selection of Alexandre Aja to direct the new "The Hills Have Eyes" was a clear signal that the remake would not spare cast, or audience, or parakeets. In some ways, Mr. Aja, who is clearly something of a Craven disciple, was an appropriate choice. His last film, the revoltingly cruel, if skillfully made, "Haute Tension" (2003), was, like "The Last House on the Left" all those years ago, a brutal demonstration of just how low an exploitation flick can stoop. Sure enough, Mr. Aja's "Hills" are alive with the sound (and sight) of appalling violence, and while a depiction of mutants sexually assaulting a young hottie (in this case Emilie de Ravin of "Lost") was never likely to be in the best of taste, there is something about the way in which Mr. Aja prolongs this particular scene (which repeats, and elaborates, on a sequence from the original movie) that vividly demonstrates the depths he is prepared to plumb: You will not feel better about yourself for having watched it. It's no surprise that Mr. Aja's epic struggled to avoid an NC-17 rating, but ghouls, completists, and any surviving members of the Manson family can relax: An "uncut" version is promised for release on DVD.

That said, before the film degenerates, as such exercises tend to do, into the standard, somewhat repetitive charnel-house chopping, slashing, ripping, dismembering, burning, slicing, gouging, and impaling, its earlier portions are effective, genuinely creepy, and will be successful in maintaining the suspense, even among those already familiar with Mr. Craven's original. As for the storyline, it has enough in common with the 1977 version to reassure the faithful, but enough that is different to delight and entrance them. The killer hillbillies of the first movie, products of nothing more than unlucky genetics, have been transformed, fashionably, into victims, their shambles of a DNA the product of atomic testing rather than careless backcountry coupling. However, as in the original, their devolved and debased clan is compared and contrasted with that of its targets and intended menu, the flawed and bickering Carters. As in the original, the most sensible Carters are their dogs.

This is in keeping with the theme of troubled and inadequate family that runs through much of Mr. Craven's work. While Mr. Craven's observations on this topic usually hover somewhere among the banal, the trite, and the tedious, Mr. Aja develops them the best he can in striking scenes set amid the remnants of an Eisenhower-era atomic test village, the Pleasantville from hell. There we witness examples of not one but three distinct and, each in their own way, distinctly problematic families, as a surviving member (the nerdy son-in-law) of the Carter family hunts down members of the mutant clan (thanks to the effects of radiation, a literally "nuclear" family) against the backdrop of what's left of yet another vi sion of domesticity, the cookie-cutter housing, "Leave It to Beaver" decor, and mannequin moms, pops, and kids of the test village, fake from the beginning and doomed to destruction.

That's cute (spot the obvious analogy!), but such ideas, and another (no less routine) subtext that, if that's what it takes to defend our own, even the most civilized among us will descend into barbarism, have less to do with this film's undeniable grip than the way it manages to tap into the deep-rooted American dread of what might be waiting out there in the hinterland. Unlike in overcrowded, long-settled Europe, where the horror film tends to focus inward, into the haunted house, into the mind, into the past, on this side of the Atlantic there is still some sense of living on the edge of the uncompleted, the uncharted, the empty, and the dangerous. The unease and the fear this can bring in its wake haunt countless American movies ("Deliverance," "The Blair Witch Project," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," to name just three), and this one, too, even if ironically, its most unsettling moments are those that echo terrors from farther afield than Flyoverland. Contrary to some speculation at the time, the first "The Hills Have Eyes" was not a Vietnam parable, and, so far as I am aware, Mr. Aja's version is not about Iraq, but it's impossible to see the Carters' vehicle optimistically heading, Stars and Stripes fluttering, deep into a hostile, mysterious, and treacherous desert without thinking of all too real horrors elsewhere.

And, at the moment, there ought to be nothing more disturbing than that.