film | Who's for dinner?

In THE HILLS HAVE EYES, as Barbra Streisand might say, people who eat people are the ugliest people in the world. Of course, you don't really watch a movie in which a clan of cannibalistic mutants nosh on unassuming vacationers stuck in the New Mexico desert and expect them to flaunt the immaculate facial structure of Jude Law, eh?

The potential hors d'oueurves in this stylized but sluggish updating of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker are a family of seven — dad (Silence of the Lambs' Ted Levine), mom (Apollo 13's Kathleen Quinlan), two teen children (Dan Byrd and Lost's Emilie de Ravin), and a grown daughter (Eyes Wide Shut's Vinessa Shaw) with a husband (Aaron Stanford) and baby of her own — on a benignly bickersome getaway to California. Director Alexandre Aja (last year's brain-eroding High Tension) wants to inspire dread and suspense when, after their Airstream mysteriously goes kaput in the middle of nowhere, the group encounters the savagely ravenous locals, only our protagonists excel at the kind of dumbass horror-movie logic (take the off-road shortcut the creepy gas-station attendant suggested? Sure! Oh no, now we're stranded ... we'd better split up!) that promises at least a couple of them to the fixin's bar of a human buffet. For genre afficionados, The Hills Have Eyes contains more than its share of sicko moments, but — save for one terrifically stomach-churning mega-jolt that results in a death you'll think the film lacks the balls to actually stage — the bloodletting feels mechanical, rote and icky-silly, especially on the heels of 2003's better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Texas Chainsaw Massacre restaging.

Hills' villains are descendants of a mining settlement nuked 50 years ago during government testing, and by the time a pole tethered to an American flag is jammed into a mutant's jugular in a violent act of self-defense, you begin to wonder about the tacit socio-political messages of Aja and co-scribe Grégory Levasseur. aside from its wonky thematic implications, the movie flounders even on a visceral level, turning the wimpy salesman son-in-law played by Stanford (terrific in Tadpole) into a vengeful 130-lb. rambo. OK, sure, it's a portrait of a mild-mannered young father forced to unleash his inner Schwarzenegger, but, as written, the transformation just doesn't convince, particularly when Stanford overcomes a bad guy we've already seen toss grown men around like plastic horseshoes. As for those mutants, well, they're gross and nasty and threatening and all ... until this Hills Have Eyes visits their gore-splattered homebase — a detour not present in the original — to find the television tuned into Divorce Court. Presumably, Judge Judy was a repeat. D+