The Hills Have Eyes: Critic Reviews

Yes, folks, it's a message movie.

Snobs may balk, purists will be appalled, but this new and exceedingly nasty version of Wes Craven's 1977 cult shocker is awfully good at what it does.

There is a strange lack of tension and no real jolts of fear in this remake of the 1977 Wes Craven film.

This remake of the alleged 1977 Wes Craven classic has one very disturbing quality: It's too damned good.

From complete dismemberment to extreme shotgun violence, Aja & Co. not only pull out the stops on this one, they decimate them.

The net effect would be doze-inducing if in fact the Dolby didn't attempt to wake the dead.

New horror films, like Aja's, simply shock us with the blunt imagery of heads being axed or blown up, and of limbs being chopped or ripped off.

Hills' new mix of old elements somehow feels fresh.

Consider it as one of the first decent 'Why do they hate us' horror flicks.

It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony.

Like the Chainsaw rehash, Eyes borrows its title and narrative from a memorably grungy '70s artifact and then proceeds to hammer each new atrocity into your skull with a quarter of the skill and 10 times the blatancy of the original.

For me, life is too short for a movie that makes death inexorably long. I would say that it is unendurable. I endured it so you don't have to.

Using considerable creative intelligence and millions of dollars with no purpose other than profit by inspiring bloodlust is monstrous.

Filled with gristle, gore and mutant mayhem, The Hills Have Eyes is a blood feast for horror fans hungering for something more than the by-rote splatter platters that lately have been filling movie theaters.

The film has an unpredictable quality that keeps viewers unnerved.

There's a distinct letdown after an astonishing and unexpected opening section, as if the gravitational pull toward trash-kitsch horror was too much to resist.

It's pretty dull to watch people killing each other for an hour and a half, no matter how bloody the pickax work gets.

These Hills are more to be endured than enjoyed.

... Aja and his gorehound ilk are making movies that simply wallow in state-of-the-art displays of torture, sadism and sexual humiliation.

This is not a remake or reinterpretation of Craven's film so much as a recapitulation of ideas from that film and other movies.

It's fair to say that this is one of the better horror films in recent months but that's more a comment on the weak field than it is a statement of unqualified praise.

This remake of the 1977 Wes Craven cult classic is brutally horrific. And that's a compliment.

Aja also comes out squarely against nuclear testing. How brave. What good is a wallow in sicko sadism if you take all the fun out of it?

On the strength of their 2003 slasher flick, High Tension, Craven hired director-writer Alexandre Aja and writer Gregory Levasseur, and the result is one of the most exhilarating, intense, and engrossing Hollywood shockers ever made.

Still not a perfect film, but it's still superior to the original.