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Violence is plentiful and intense in 'The Hills Have Eyes'

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Hollywood remakes are a dime a dozen, and let's not even start in on how studio suits have been trashing classic low-budget American horror by filming inferior do-overs.

Wes Craven's well-liked 1977 "The Hills Have Eyes," with its creepy cannibals mutated by atomic testing fallout out West, is the latest redo. From time to time, it's at least a remake that works.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

'The Hills Have Eyes'

The verdict: Sometimes it works, sometimes it's just horror-movie overkill.

Director: Alexandre Aja
Starring: Aaron Stanford, Ted Levine, Kathleen Quinlan, Vinessa Shaw, Emilie De Ravin
Run time: 107 minutes
Release date: March 10, 2000
Rating: R for strong gruesome violence and terror throughout, and for language.
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Directed by Alexander Aja, the Frenchman who unleashed extreme gore in the bloody, violent "High Tension," the new, high-powered "The Hills Have Eyes" has commitment.

It's a horror film intent on spending every cent of its healthy budget while showing disgusting creeps doing disgusting things to a seven-member American family vacationing with their two dogs and a couple of pet birds in extremely isolated, dusty New Mexico.

"Hills" likes its violence plentiful and intense, with wild eyes peeking out from bloody faces. There are axings, a crucifixion-style torching, gunshots and explosions that rip bodies apart. Oh, yeah, and a suicide by shotgun blast that shatters half of a guy's head.

Craven produced this film, and what's puzzling is why he allowed some aspects of his original story to be dropped. The original film ultimately became a battle of two families, both led by aggressive fathers.

This time, however, the story is more focused on a kind of meat-market smorgasbord mixed with political "the-government-did-this-to-us" overtones. It doesn't really work.

Also, in the first film, it was unsettling that, in order to try to survive, some of the family members had to use one of their own who'd already been killed as bait for the cannibals. That's now gone.

So is the original's icky fun of the cannibals continuously referring to a captured baby as "tenderloin."

What we get instead is an extended scene of a sexual attack on two women. The new film goes so far as to have a deformed cannibal holding a gun to a woman's baby while he molests her.

Is that too much terror or too much depravity?

Like in the recent Australian film "Wolf Creek," which spent much time on a killer's sexual torture of women, it's a little too much of both.