Run From the Hills!

I believe I've written before about the "panning for gold approach" I believe one has to take in watching horror/thriller/suspense movies. You have to be willing to watch many in order to find one that's actually really good. The problem with this approach is the flip side -- every so often, you find one so unimaginably bad, you envy the characters being killed in the story for being finished with the movie sooner than you.

Last night, I saw The Hills Have Eyes. It's a remake of an old Wes Craven film, where natives of the desert where nuclear testing was conducted on U.S. soil have been mutated into carnivorous tourist murderers that still prowl to this day. This movie was beyond terrible. It's 100 gallons of dumb in a 10 gallon tank. I can think of nothing redeeming about it. I'm going to spoil things about it, and you shouldn't care. No one else should have to waste the time I did. This movie probably averaged better than one phenomally dumb piece of writing per minute of screen time. Here are just a few of the "highlights."

Before the credits, we see a geological survey team measuring radiation in the waste. They're offed by the mutants. If random families are disappearing in this area, I can see it continuing unchecked. But if a government survey team goes missing -- someone is going to notice that.

One of the characters stumbles across a blast crater where various cars from past victims have been left. But at this point, we've already seen that the mutant MO is to total a vehicle by booby trapping the road, thus stranding the car. How they're then transporting them eight miles down a dirt road is a ludicrous mystery.

The father of the family is supposed to be a retired police detective. But he's shown freaking out and firing his rounds blindly into the dark. And then he's jumped by a mutant from the back seat of a car.

The creepy local gas station attendant who has been sending hapless people into the hills to meet their doom and "feed" the nuclear mutants somehow decides this family is the last straw. No particular indication why. Oh, not that it stops him from sending them to certain death. It's just the later, he feels so bad about it, he blows his own head off with a shotgun.

We're shown a fully intact (though decaying) "nuclear test village" where the mutants make their home, even though any such structures would surely have been annihilated in any actual test blasts -- after all, that was the point of building them. (Not to mention, we see real life footage of these places being disintegrated in the opening credits of the film.)

The movie actually plays a "revenge plot" for a pet. The family has two dogs traveling with them. One is killed early on by the mutants. The other later discovers the carcass of his "mate" ("sister"?) in the desert, in a "touching" one-minute scene with no humans (mutated or otherwise) anywhere on camera. From then on, the dog is in full-on ass-kicking mode. Near the end of the movie he gets to eviscerate one of the mutants. In a way, this dovetails perfectly with Shocho's recent "who do macho kids save?" post. Pets, we decided. And now this movie shows us who macho pets save. Their owners. The circle is now complete.

Two of the kids come up with the "plan" to lure one of the baddies into their trailer, which they have leaked gas into and rigged to blow up. Yes, their plan is to destroy their only shelter in the desert. The real cherry on this sundae is that when the young boy goes to lure the baddie into the trap, he's armed with a gun and manages to sneak up on the baddie without being noticed at first. But does he just plug the mutant right there? No... that wasn't the "plan."

No cliche goes untapped. Weapons are dropped by the heroes next to the not-quite-dead bodies of the villains they think they've dispatched. One of the mutants is revealed to actually have a "heart of gold." Every scare in the film is a "cheap scare" -- a rapid cut or pan, accompanied by an over-the-top music sting.

F this movie. Seriously, F this movie. This movie gets an F. It's not even worthy of the "so bad it's good" label, because way too much money was spent making it.

The hills may have eyes. You'll want to gouge yours out.