The Hills Have Eyes
Director: Alexandre Aja
Grade: D+

“I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity to American Cinema because it has no ideas.”

-Jean-Luc Godard

What happens then when you give a Frenchmen a lot of money? Well, sadly, you get the Hills Have Eyes.

While a case can be made as to whether or not the quality of American films has been steadily declining since the second golden age of the 70s, one genre in American filmmaking in particular has lately and repeatedly demonstrated that its creative wells have all but dried up. I’m speaking of course of the genre of horror, which, in the right hands can produce masterful results, but far too often is placed under the direction of gung-ho amateurs. Amateurs, for instance, like Alexandre Aja and his equally pointless remake of the Hills Have Eyes.

If we treat the genre of horror as a finely sculpted statue, chiseled by many hands across generations that have each left their own signifying mark upon it, then Aja is merely a raving-mad blind man whose finishing touch is to simply lop its head off. Which is to say, that he constructs his film from the weariest of cliches, the most beat-to-death ones he could drag from the grave and splatter across the screen (the false scares that lead into the real one, the figures that rush past the camera in the foreground, the villain merely playing dead), and beyond that only seeks to one-up past film makers in the ruthlessness of the violence. A meager task of which I’m sad to say he still falls short.

I catalogued numerous scenes in which Aja sets himself up for some truly creepy deep focus scares; the kind that don’t require those harsh notes to accompany them. Far too often horror relies solely on the close-up to achieve its results. In horror, all danger comes from off screen, so directors attempt to limit our perspective as much as possible, conjuring up situations that could never play out in reality, but become entirely plausible within the realm of the genre. But what if the threat wasn’t merely a jolt that slices through the former onscreen tranquility, but a real presence visible to the audience, but unknown to the hero, a scene that plays out in front of the camera without the interference of distracting montage? Those were the moments where I wanted Aja to utilize those shots-in-depth to create unease, rather than cop-out with the cheap thrills.

Perhaps that’s already asking too much. At the very least, though, work with an original script. It’s one thing to adapt from literature, it’s an entirely different thing to adapt from theater, but it’s a decidedly pointless undertaking to adapt directly from cinema without alteration. At least when Craven himself lifted the framework of Last House on the Left from Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring, he brought it into a contemporary mindset and tailored it to fit his own agenda.

To return full circle to Godard, his contention had always been that the best way to criticize a film is to make another, a mantra he no doubt put into practice. Contemporary filmmaking, on the other hand, seems largely devoid of that criticism and a shallow remake of The Hills shows little in the way of actually working either for or against the former. It exists solely to capitalize on the idea of the original. One has to marvel at what leads a man to get into such work. For some of us, we watch films and they inspire us to make a film, for others they watch a film and all they want is to make that film. Is it passion, or just laziness?