The Hills Have Eyes

There are 4.8 million kinds of people in the world, but two of them are: those who see a flagstone walk in a park and say, "How beautiful," and those who see a flagstone walk in the park, walk to the nearest flagstone, pry it up to inspect a subterranean universe of maggots, hairy spiders, carnivorous bug-things and horrific multi-tendrilled amoeba and say, "How beautiful."

The remake of "The Hills Have Eyes" is for the second kind of people.

In fact it is so for the second kind of people that all of the first kind of people should not merely be forewarned, they should immediately put down the newspaper or double-click the mouse and head for shelter. Otherwise, to read what follows will greatly disturb them. Please, nice people: Go away.

For those of you who are left, this remake of the alleged 1977 Wes Craven classic has one very disturbing quality: It's too damned good.

French director Alexandre Aja, who made a blood-splashed international debut a couple of months back with "High Tension," a vigorous reimagining with especially salacious details of the Freddy-Jason mad-slaughterer genre of films, is a great reworker. (See In Focus on Page 31.)

The basics are this:

A disputatious, dysfunctional red state clan is headed to California in a big SUV and trailer. You can tell they're doomed to slaughter. But as the Wicked Witch says in "The Wizard of Oz," quizzically noodling her pointy chin: "But . . . it's how to do it?"

Aja comes up with all sorts of ways. Hmmm, burning at the stake, for one. How about a pickax in the head (a favorite), or the first recorded close-up kill with the new Smith & Wesson .500 magnum (messy!), but there are all sorts of other new and different ways. One question: Why wasn't it rated NC-17 instead of R? Really, the Motion Picture Association of America has a lot to answer for. But that's another way of returning to the central issue of this review: This one's way rough. Anyway, even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

-- Stephen Hunter

<em>Contains gory violence.</em>