Right before I left for the movie, Larry Mantle had his civilized film guys on to deliver a few sentences on the week's new flicks. In reference to Alexandre Aja's comparatively high-end new remake of The Hills Have Eyes, one of them said that nuclear films, films about nuclear topics, used to mean something, but that this was just "cosmic gore."

Yeah, okay. It is pretty violent. I have a feeling, though, that if this guy watched Craven's 1977 version, he'd find the paint-red blood fake, dated, or campy. Of course, many civilized critics consider that film and its brethren to be flimsy, exploitative junk, and if our critic feels the nuclear aspect of the new film is irrelevant, surely he'd pick a similar bone with the original: the nuclear aspect is more explication there than anything else, just a premise to explain the presence of the family, absence of infrastructure, and appearance of Michael Berryman. An early draft of the script had the cannibal family the offspring of hippies - hence the names "Jupiter," "Pluto," and the other planets, and Craven has stated that the family wasn't really supposed to be mutants at all, but simply a wild clan living outside human law. Craven is much more interested in the family dynamic and devotes a scene to explaining why the family came to exist; his interest is personal, motivational, and familial. As has always been the case, he is deeply interested in fatherhood, and the gas station attendant's role in his son's fate is the motivating factor in the film's interest in setting types of families against each other.

Aja replaces this basic premise, using nuclear and radioactive fear as the primary factor in determining not just the mutants' location, but their reason for being. He too gives a character a short speech of explication, but this one is accusatory, referring to dynamics not familial but nuclear. The locations make it that much more explicit, not merely referring to an empty stretch of desert but bringing back the relevance of the testing grounds, from the hollowed-out scars of the desert to the creepy, somehow sensible locale of the climax.

These new mutants are a tricky bunch. For one thing, they're ugly. In 1977, Ruby was feral but kind of cute, and with that in mind, her appearance here comes as a surprise - so much for a remake of Part 2, predicated on Ruby's acceptance into society. Michael Berryman was always scary-looking, but he was sort of charming in the original Hills (his first major role), a little dim-witted, a little vulnerable, with his own personality, skills, and even - unusual for a movie villain - fears. (His connection with Beast works so well that it seems completely natural when it returns in Part 2.) The new Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) is different - less developed, certainly, but very accurately what he is supposed to be - a large, strong, ugly, lumpen creation of radioactivity with questionable mental function. True, he doesn't have the sense of hurt that Berryman brought to Pluto, but what do we need to like him for? The new mutants don't really want to be liked. They don't rate character development; they don't talk much. The original family was a lot more verbose, but these mutants have less to say for themselves. Though most of them are capable, they converse with each other less, and when they speak now, it's more often to gloat; when they laugh, it's spiteful. Papa Jupiter's more personal reasons for being have...

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Topics: horror, movies