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The Hills Have Eyes lacks credibility and the various incidents that take place have little rhyme and even less reason, writes Ervell E. Menezes
Take an ex-cop from Cleveland "Big Bob" Carter (Ted Levine) who’s missing the excitement of the job and get him to go to California by road. Being part of the 1960s flower power scene, he and his wife Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) want to revive old memories. It is to celebrate their wedding anniversary, so they decide to take their not-too-enthusiastic extended family along. So far so good. But The Hills Have Eyes lacks credibility and the various incidents that take place have little rhyme and even less reason with the result there is little or no involvement with the viewer whose only concern is for the show to end. It is a god sprinkling of characters, the son-in-law tech geek Doug (Aaron Standford) could use the trip to get closer to the old man while his wife and the eldest daughter Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) are more concerned with the child. The younger girl Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) is missing her college friends and the youngest Bobby (Dan Byrd) is game for anything. There are two German shepherd dogs Beauty and the Beast, to add to the numbers. They begin with a huddle and an invocation to the guardian angel, which doesn’t seem to work for as soon as tough cop Carter takes a detour, their intended destination, California, goes out of the window. They find themselves in the middle of a desert when their car breaks down. What next? "Something is not right here. We’re not alone", says old Carter. There’s some mumbo-jumbo of a genetically mutated species, the product of mining and those atomic tests near Mexico and they are said to be bloodthirsty. Why they attack and how they hide is hardly explained. Based on Wes Craven’s cult classic, the horror is contrived. The screenplay is full of holes and directors Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur are keen on action without the reasons for doing so. Hence it comes under the "horror for horror’s sake" genre. True some of the players, especially young Emilie de Ravin, Dan Byrd, give good accounts of themselves but the story is a non-starter and the film meanders along painfully. Quite a waste of the rather interesting setting. Being in the middle of nowhere is ideal film material but they make quite a hash of things. Before the halfway mark one just switches off. Like Humpty Dumpty, it just cannot be put together again.
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