THE HILLS HAVE EYES

Directed by Alexandre Aja. Starring Aaron Stanford, Kathleen Quinlan, Vinessa Shaw, Emilie de Ravin, Tom Bower, Ted Levine, Robert Joy, Billy Drago 18 cert, gen release, 107 min

TO AN even greater extent than his earlier The Last House on the Left, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in which cannibalistic mutants ruin a family holiday, is something of a holy text for horror movie enthusiasts. Those adherents who saw Alexandre Aja's fine Switchblade Romance were, therefore, somewhat relieved to discover that the French director, rather than some pop-video nonentity, had been commissioned to deliver the inevitable remake.

As things have worked out, Aja has made a decent fist of his task. We do, inevitably, miss that unsettling combination of grainy cinematography and flat acting found equally in avant-garde cinema, hardcore pornography and extreme horror during the 1970s. And no Hills could be counted complete without an appearance by the creepy Michael Berryman. (Why no cameo, Alex?) But this year's version is suitably slow to build and is infused with enough grim humour to qualify as a worthy entity in its own right. It's grimy, it's sweaty and the cannibals run the gamut from terrifyingly psychotic to pathetically poignant.

Following a terrific title sequence which blends footage of nuclear explosions with images of mutant children, the film brings us among the Carter family. This classically conservative unit are making their way through the desert towards California when their car breaks down. Crucifixions, molestations and the mastication of living flesh follows.

The original picture was often read as an allegory for Vietnam, and it was always inevitable that the remake would draw comparisons with the situation in Iraq. Aja can, therefore, be forgiven for accepting the inevitable and allowing some vaguely subversive things to happen to an American flag.

More irritating is the sense that, to placate the censors, some tinkering has gone on with the more extreme sequences. Viewers may, quite reasonably, not want to watch a hideously deformed ghoul rape a teenage girl, but the suspiciously muddled scene that occupies the space where such an event happened in the original only serves to confuse things. Nobody is going to enter the cinema expecting Bagpuss. Good, nasty stuff, nonetheless.

Donald Clarke