| The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006)
What was the point of this remake? Aja and Maddellena said in the documentary that the atomic testing stuff (I'm not spoiling anything, its all over the previews and the cliche main titles) was a justification to remake the film. That really added nothing to the film and in fact took away from the suspense and the characters. The original cannibals were developed characters. Here, we don't get to know any of them. As a result, there is no real resonance in any of their gory comeuppances (which were really a let down in the unrated version I saw) - they were prosthetics even before the gunshots, pickaxes, and dog fangs. The OTHER family was better drawn. The kids (Dan Byrd, Emilie de Raven, and Vinessa Shaw) gave good performances. Kathleen Quinlan was good as usual. Ted Levine finally gave a performance where I forgot he was "the guy from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS" though that may be just because he looks so different from back then. The father of the baby got to do more here but he's just as uninteresting a fellow to follow around as in the original (even with the added stuntwork).
Other than the uninterestingly developed atomic subplot, the film follows the original so well that there is no suspense. Pretty much everyone dies who is supposed to.
SPOILER:
(thus, the deaths of the members of the normal family are not shockingly unexpected as they were in the original - Dee Wallace's death in the original was a surprise). Everyone who we know are going to survive, does so.
While the film is pretty much a faithful "remake" of the original, it is also stylistically basically an American remake of Aja's HIGH TENSION. Even the DVD menus of the the two films look almost exactly the same!
Unlike the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, the THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake is not even entertaining on its own apart from the original.
I pretty much avoided the remakes of TEXAS CHAINSAW and AMITYVILLE HORROR and did not bother to read the reviews. Can anyone recommend them or do you think I'd find the same flaws in them that I found off-putting in HILLS. | 
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