THE HILLS HAVE EYES

The Carter family is crossing the New Mexico desert in a camper to spend their vacation in California. After stopping at an isolated gas station to refuel, Big Bob, the head of the family, follows the station attendant's advice and takes a shortcut not shown on the map, but a trap on the road forces the Carters off the road and forces them to camp in that portion of the desert far from civilization. But danger is lurking because someone from the hills is watching the struggling family: a clan of mutant humanoids and cannibals who have established their hunting territory in that area. It has been about three years since Hollywood has been seized by an insatiable cannibalistic hunger that drives producers and distributors of all kinds to avidly devour every cult film from the recent past and excrete a revised and corrected version for the modern public. It will be a worrying lack of original ideas, it will be a cunning and immoral commercial maneuver, but the fact is that every film that in the '70s had a good success or recently "broke box office records" in the East, MUST have a remake that makes it known to the modern public of teenagers. It is normal, therefore, that even the cult film directed in 1977 by Wes Craven had a remake, this time strongly desired by Craven himself, along with the then producer Peter Locke (and also of this new version along with the same Craven), who entrusted the direction to the young French director Alexandre Aja, already director of the bloodiest "High Tension." One must, however, make a due clarification: the release of a remake does not correspond dogmatically to a guarantee of poor quality, indeed in these years we have seen alternating with useless remakes and rather ugly ones also very dignified quality products, films that often add a lot to the prototype or manage to read it under a different optic, giving life to almost an autonomous film. "The Hills Have Eyes" belongs precisely to this category of remakes; in fact, it is a film that, while following the screenplay of the original quite faithfully (with the exception of the prologue, the epilogue and a long additional sequence), manages to make the main theme of the film not the metaphorical opposition between barbarism and civilization, with the consequent victory of the former over the latter, but to focus on quite different territories. "The Hills Have Eyes" by Aja has no sociological aspirations, but is a long and cruel reflection on the pragmatic association of "cause and effect," explicitly relatable to the fundamental role that the United States had (unconsciously?) in the creation of the monsters of society. Alexandre Aja, together with colleague Grégory Levasseur, chose to deepen in the screenplay an aspect that in Craven's work was only hinted at, that is the cause of the mutations in the inhabitants of the hills: here it is clearly explained that the area of New Mexico where the cannibal mutants were born and raised, in the '50s, was the subject of nuclear experiments by the United States army, and those who inhabit it today are the result of the negligence and ruthlessness of those who then ignored them. In a significant speech that a deformed anthropophagous undertakes with the film's protagonist, we understand the anger and desire for revenge that drives the mutants to a desire to destroy upper-class American society, a terrorist desire to devour what cannot be had (or be). All this is explicitly mentioned by the anarchic way of life of the cannibal mutants who here are no longer, as in Craven's film, a simple family, but a real small village that has settled in the fake town populated by mannequins where nuclear tests took place, a place where time has stopped in the '50s, a place where the American anthem is sung in a distorted and disturbing version, where the star-spangled banner is used as a macabre ornament for corpses, where the slaughtered tourists are kept in large supermarket refrigerators. Of course, "The Hills Have Eyes" does not set itself the sole goal of giving a political reading of America's outcasts, but also aims to entertain and disgust the genre-loving spectator; and so with a relentless pace and a carousel of atrocities that have made us well recognize the Alexandre Aja of "High Tension," thanks to a series of sadistic and deliciously gory scenes designed by the award-winning Berger&Nicotero;, creators of special effects and the terrifying and realistic make-up of the mutants. In this remake, we have a greater number of antagonists, a higher number to ensure that there are enough inhabitants to populate the post-atomic village; so in addition to the already known Jupiter and his wife with their offspring Pluto, Mercury, Mars (rather disappointing if compared to the legendary character with big hair and fake teeth from Craven's cult) and Ruby (here also she, rightly, in mutant version), other horrid genetic aberrations are added. In this remake, on the one hand, we have a greater depth given to the members of the Carter family, with internal tensions that oppose the Republican head of the family and the Democratic son-in-law, on the other hand, we have a lesser characterization of the antagonists, probably due to the excessive number of the same, among which the little Ruby and the deformed but sympathetic Pluto are remembered with greater pleasure. The cast does not include any star attraction, but is nevertheless composed of good actors, among whom the most notable is without a doubt Ted Levine who played Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs," here engaged in the role of the head of the family Big Bob; then we have Aaron Stanford("X-men 2" and "X-men: The Final Battle") in the role of the protagonist Doug and Emilie De Ravin (the serial "Lost") in the role of Brenda. In conclusion, "The Hills Have Eyes" is pleasantly remembered as one of the happiest and most successful examples of remakes of recent years (probably along with "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Dawn of the Dead"), thanks to its taste for macabre excess and the choice to read the story under different themes. Not able to reach the retro charm and cult status of its famous predecessor, but still leaves a memory as a highly valid film.