THE EVIL THAT JOGS EVILLYSo we saw the remake of
The Hills Have Eyes. Oh boy. The original is not one of my favorites and to be honest I only saw it for the first time recently. I found it dated and not particularly compelling, though it has one of the greatest shots in 70s horror where evil jogs towards its prey in broad daylight. There is no jogging evil in the 2006 version. It's practically the same movie until the infamous rape/murder/kidnapping sequence, where the new version veers off into a completely different direction. It's not a very good direction either. And it made me appreciate the evil that jogs.
The original is inspired by the Sawney Beane family, a real-life family of 17th century Scottish cannibals who never actually existed. Legend has it that they were hunted down by King James, dragged to Edinburgh and then executed in a way that shows that civilized society can be just as brutal as a bunch of degenerates who live in a cave and eat people.
Which is pretty much the point of Wes Craven's
The Hills Have Eyes. It is definitively about two families: the All American Carters and the cannibalistic pre-inbred Jupiter clan. The Carters are bland and boring and kind of irritating in an all-American way. There is a truly horrifying pair of 70s-era gym shorts, which in the annals of sartorial horror rank up at the top with Christopher Lee's yellow turtleneck in
The Wicker Man. But enough about the Carters.
The Jupiter Clan consists of Papa Jupiter, um, Mama Jupiter, their sons Mercury, Mars, and Pluto (played by Michael Berryman, who is super-nice in person), and daughter Ruby (because Venus would be too obvious). They live in the desert and kill and eat wayward travelers, which isn't very nice, but what else are you going to do?
And now I'm going to spoil the heck out of both movies.
The Carters get stranded and in the middle of the night and attacked. I won't go into details because you've either seen the movie and know what happens, or haven't and shouldn't have it completely ruined. As the poster says, "the lucky ones die first." And in the midst of everything, the smartest member of the Carter family - the dog- kills one of the Jupiters. This really pisses off Papa Jupiter to no end. He vows revenge and after the sun rises... Evil jogs.
Which brings us to probably the most fucked up thing in both versions of the movie. The two youngest Carter children use their mother's dead body as bait for a trap. This does not happen in the remake. That's right. The remake was marketed as being this ultraviolent, balls-to-the- wall gorefest that will fuck you up for life if you even dared to watch it. And they didn't even carry over the dead-mom-as-bait bit.
What the remake does is completely eschew the idea that the hill people are any sort of family. They might be one, but there is nothing in the film that establishes them as being related to one another in any way. In the remake, the hill people are a bunch of people who refused to leave an area where nuclear testing is being done. So they mutate. It suggests that the mutants are the descendents of the original people who stayed during bomb testing. The mutants in the movie are deformed, super-strong, and evil. This differs from real-life people with mutations who have a tendency to be deformed, diseases, and dead. There are a couple of folks in this movie who have deformities that nobody could live to adulthood with without constant medical attention. And these are people who live in caves in the hills and I don't think any of them are doctors.
There's not even a Papa Jupiter.
Sure, there's a character who is referred to as "Jupiter," but we never see him referred to when he's onscreen. I can only assume that I know which character is Jupiter because I've seen the original and can base the assumption on how this fella gets hisself killed. But because there's absolutely no establishment that the hill people are a family, what makes the original work is completely missing and what we're left with is an exercise in gore. Granted, it's Greg Nicotero gore, so the gore is impressive, but there's no subtext, so none of it means anything.
And they even give it a happy ending.
Now, any movie that involves most of the surviving protagonists' family being murdered, raped, and eaten can't really have a happy ending. But the original ends with a father who has gone after his kidnapped infant daughter avenging his murdered wife by savagely killing the person responsible. It's brutal and the credits come in right in the middle of it. There's no catharsis, no release, and no reconciliation with the other family members. At the end the survivors are scattered and we're left watching a wholly justifiable act of violence and asked to question what we'd do in the same situation. The remake ends with a family hug and a gimmick that sets up a sequel.
So I suppose that I actually do like the original The Hills Have Eyes quite a lot, jogging evil and all. It just took a mediocre remake to make me realize it.
And for the record, here's how I feel about other horror remakes that I can think of off the top of my head:
The Good
The Thing
The Fly
Dawn of the Dead (Man, this shouldn't have worked, but it does. And who can hate a movie that has both Johnny Cash and Richard Cheese on the soundtrack?)
House of Wax (Trick entry. The Vincent Price version is actually a remake.)
WillardThe Bad & The Ugly
13 Ghosts
The Haunting
The Shining (So what if it's closer to the book? Kubrick knew what he was doing.)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
