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Do you have the stomach?

The Hills Have Eyes

Director: Alexandre Aja

Cast: Aaron Stanford, Ted Levine, Emilie De Ravine, Dan Byrd

THIS IS one film that must begin with a disclaimer: "Warning: not for the faint-hearted." Chances are, even if you are not faint-hearted, this film can leave you gagging in parts. A remake of the 1977 Wes Craven original of the same name, The Hills Have Eyes shows just what results an ardent horror-movie fan like director Alexandre Aja can produce given a nearly limitless budget.

The Hills Have Eyes sees a Southern, mostly Republican family being misled by an archetypal suspicious-looking petrol station attendant into a defunct nuclear test sight. When night falls, the mutant miners — unimaginably deformed by the radiation and surviving off the flesh of murdered tourists — attack. On the most immediate level, The Hills Have Eyes works for any horror fan (simply because it takes a predictable, by-the-book stance and delivers a compact, superbly picturised, shot and edited product. The film itself is crisp and restrained, proceeding even through its most violent indulgences with an incredible business-like efficiency.

One of the few faults with the film is the artificiality of its characters. Liberal, gun-hating Doug (Aaron Stanford), for instance, shifts from pacifism to skull bashing and back to pacifism rather too easily.

While none of the other characters make that jump, they don't much of a personality either.

Still, who could ever turn down possibly the first close up of a suicide by shotgun or more than a couple of pickaxe massacres?

Rakesh Mehar

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