‘The Hills Have Eyes’ too gross to be good

In theaters

THE HILLS HAVE EYES, directed by Alexandre Aja, written by Aja and Gregory Levasseur, 105 minutes, rated R.

The new Alexandre Aja movie, “The Hills Have Eyes,” is a remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 classic, which caused something of a stink when it was released nearly 30 years ago. Too graphic, some said, too much blood. And few liked the idea of anyone feasting on a baby. Go figure.

Thing is, when compared to this Craven-produced jewel from Aja (“High Tension”), which incredibly received only an R rating from the MPAA when an NC-17 rating is absolutely what it deserved, Craven’s version now looks like playtime for tots.

As written by Aja and Gregory Levasseur, “The Hills Have Eyes” is one ugly, violent piece of moviemaking that struggles to sustain energy in spite of all the blood it sheds, all the body parts it lops off, all the savagery it unleashes. Its only narrative drive comes from the fact that its nasty streak of violence tends to drive people out of theaters, which was the case at my screening, with several members of its target audience unhappily filing out midway through.

It was tough to blame them.

The film begins with archival footage of nuclear testing interlaced with actual shots of disfigured children, some of whom appear to be deceased. The children and their deformities are shown in close-up before they dissolve into mushroom clouds. This is entertainment? Aja thinks so, but then his movie really gets down to business.

It cuts to the New Mexico desert, where the people who were affected by the nuclear fallout as children now are angry adult mutants who thrill at the idea of slamming pickaxes into the backs, faces, torsos and limbs of their unsuspecting victims. They do this, we learn, because they’re furious to have been left behind and forgotten by the rest of the country after the nuclear testing. Fair enough. But why present their case in a movie that refuses to allow them a trace of sympathy? A more effective, timely remake would have allowed us to root for them as they fought big government. But forget logic.

Since Aja resists the idea that what is left off screen and to our imagination often is more terrifying; he shows us everything. As such, his film trips on its own entrails – sometimes quite literally.

The movie follows the Carter family, who have left Cleveland for a vacation that finds them detouring through this desert. After the aforementioned carnage that opens the show, what ensues is 45 minutes of long-winded tedium before the movie launches into an hour of unrelenting murder, cannibalism, rape, the grotesque torture of a pregnant woman, the rough handling of her infant child, a burning crucifixion and other atrocities as the Carter family (Ted Levine, Kathleen Quinlan, Dan Byrd, Emile de Ravin, Vinessa Shaw, Aaron Stanford) is slowly carved down to only a few.

Where is the fun in a movie like this? There are no jolts, no flashes of humor, no camp aspect, no winking at the audience – just bloodletting that crosses the line. Those who want this sort of thing can have it.

Grade: D

On video and DVD

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, directed by George Clooney, written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, 108 minutes, rated R.

George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” is similar to Clooney’s more recent movies in that it keeps audiences on the outside. It’s an incubator of a movie, designed to be insular.

There are dangers in that, not the least of which is the chance that you might leave viewers emotionally cold if your story and its characters are too aloof. That was the case in “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Ocean’s Twelve,” two movies too hip for their own good; “Solaris,” which smacked of self-indulgence; and “Intolerable Cruelty,” whose focus was more on the physical attributes of its stars – Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones – than on the characters they inhabited.

“Good Night, and Good Luck” follows suit, but in this case, the isolation Clooney courts actually aids the film, giving it a sense of urgency it might have lacked.

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white by cinematographer Robert Elswit, here is a movie you watch with admiration for its subject, its technical achievements and its excellent performances. The caveat is that the movie is so ensconced in the time it evokes, the mid-1950s, that it demands that those who view it know a good deal about the events it explores in order to follow it with ease.

Younger audiences unaware of the showdown that took place between CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Sen. Joseph McCarthy (played in news footage by himself), for instance, might initially find themselves scrambling to keep pace, as several readers have expressed through e-mail.

Their concerns and frustrations aren’t unreasonable – Clooney refuses to hold anyone’s hand here. But in defense of the movie, which can be enormously rewarding, this is a film whose larger issues of censorship and big government, journalism and the tricky relationship between news corporations and the advertisers who help bring us our news, are as timely now as they ever have been.

Grade: A-

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@

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