Note: The film’s British title is Switchblade Romance, which, if you see the film, will seem curiouser and curiouser.
The Hills Have Eyes
(DIRECTED BY ALEXANDRE AJA; STARRING AARON STANFORD, KATHLEEN QUINLAN; 2006)
It always begins with the Wrong Gas Station. In real life, as I pointed out in my review of a previous Wrong Gas Station movie, most gas stations are clean, well-lighted places, where you can buy not only gasoline but also groceries, clothes, electronic devices, Jeff Foxworthy CDs, and a full line of Harley merchandise. In horror movies, however, the only gas station in the world is located on a desolate road in a godforsaken backwater. It is staffed by a degenerate who shuffles out in his coveralls and runs through a disgusting repertory of scratchings, spittings, chewings, twitchings, and leerings, while thoughtfully shifting mucus up and down his throat.
The clean-cut heroes of the movie, be they a family on vacation, newlyweds, college students, or backpackers, all have one thing in common. They believe everything this man tells them, especially when he suggests they turn left on the unpaved road for a shortcut. Does it ever occur to them that in this desolate wasteland with only one main road, it must be the road to stay on if they ever again want to use their cell phones?
No. It does not. They take the fatal detour, and find themselves the prey of demented mutant incestuous cannibalistic gnashing slobberers, who carry pickaxes the way other people carry umbrellas. They occupy junkyards, towns made entirely of wax, nuclear waste zones and Motel Hell (“It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters”). That is the destiny that befalls a vacationing family in The Hills Have Eyes, which is a very loose remake of the 1977 movie of the same name.
The Carter family is on vacation. Dad (Ted Levine) is a retired detective who plans to become a security guard. Mom is sane, lovable Kathleen Quinlan. A daughter and son-in-law (Vinessa Shaw and Aaron Stanford) have a newborn babe. There are also two other Carter children (Dan Byrd and Emilie de Ravin), and two dogs named Beauty and Beast. They have hitched up an Airstream and are on a jolly family vacation through the test zones where 331 atmospheric nuclear tests took place in the 1950s and 1960s.
After the Carters turn down the wrong road, they’re fair game for the people who are the eyes of the hills. These are descendants of miners who refused to leave their homes when the government ordered them away from the testing grounds. They hid in mines, drank radioactive water, reproduced with their damaged DNA, and brought forth mutants who live by eating trapped tourists.
There is an old bomb crater filled with the abandoned cars and trucks of their countless victims. It is curiously touching, in the middle of this polluted wasteland, to see a car that was towing a boat that still has its outboard motor attached. No one has explained what the boat was seeking at that altitude.
The plot is easily guessed. Ominous events occur. The family makes the fatal mistake of splitting up; Dad walks back to the Wrong Gas Station, while the dogs bark like crazy and run away, and young Bobby chases them into the hills. Meanwhile, the mutants entertain themselves by passing in front of the camera so quickly you can’t really see them, while we hear a loud sound, halfway between a swatch and a swootch, on the sound track. Just as a knife in a slasher movie can make a sharpening sound just because it exists, so do mutants make swatches and swootches when they run in front of cameras.
I received some appalled feedback when I praised Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2005), but I admired two things about it: (1) It desired to entertain and not merely to sicken, and (2) its depraved killers were individuals with personalities, histories, and motives. The Hills Have Eyes finds an intriguing setting in “typical” fake towns built by the government, populated by mannequins, and intended to be destroyed by nuclear blasts. But its mutants are simply engines of destruction. There is a misshapen creature who coordinates attacks with a walkie-talkie; I would have liked to know more about him, but no luck.
Nobody in this movie has ever seen a Dead Teenager Movie, and so they don’t know (1) you never go off alone, (2) you especially never go off alone at night, and (3) you never follow your dog when it races off barking insanely, because you have more sense than the dog. It is also possibly not a good idea to walk back to the Wrong Gas Station to get help from the degenerate who sent you on the detour in the first place.
It is not faulty logic that derails The Hills Have Eyes, however, but faulty drama. The movie is a one-trick pony. We have the eaters and the eatees, and they will follow their destinies until some kind of desperate denouement, possibly followed by a final shot showing that It’s Not Really Over, and there will be a The Hills Have Eyes II. Of course, there was already a The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), but then again there was a The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and that didn’t stop them. Maybe this will. Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Hoot
(DIRECTED BY WIL SHRINER; STARRING LOGAN LERMAN, LUKE WILSON; 2006)
Hoot has its heart in the right place, but I have been unable to locate its brain. Here is a movie about three kids who begin by disliking or fearing one another, and end up as urban guerrillas, sabotaging the construction of a pancake house that will destroy a nesting ground for burrowing owls. Yes, there are such birds, who sublet burrows originally dug by squirrels and prairie dogs and such, or occasionally dig their own dream burrows. They seem wide-eyed with astonishment at their lifestyle, but actually that is just the way they look.
The hero of the movie is Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman), whom we meet on horseback in Montana, complaining that his family is moving again—this time to Florida. His dad has moved something like five times in eight years, which in the white-collar world means you are either incompetent or the CEO. In his new school, he’s picked on by a bully and breaks the bully’s nose to create a subplot utterly unnecessary to the story.
His school career takes an upturn when he meets two extraordinary (not to say unbelievable) students his own age. Beatrice the Bear (Brie Larson) is a soccer player with a fearsome reputation, which the movie halfheartedly establishes in a perfunctory manner before revealing her as a true-blue best pal who befriends Roy Eberhardt (he is often referred to by both names). Meanwhile, Roy Eberhardt is fascinated by a kid he sees running barefoot through the town. He tries to chase him, fails, finally catches up with him, is scared off by a sack of cottonmouth snakes, and eventually makes friends with him. This is Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley), a cross between Tarzan and Huckleberry Finn.
Mullet lives in hiding on a houseboat, doesn’t go to school, and devotes his life to sabotaging the efforts by Curly (Tim Blake Nelson) to build the hated pancake house. He pulls up the surveying stakes, steals the seat from the bulldozer, and otherwise generates trouble for the local Keystone Kop, named Officer Delinko (Luke Wilson). Delinko is so incompetent that one night he stakes out the construction site and oversleeps because Mullet Fingers has painted all the windows of his prowler black.
The movie’s climax involves one of those situations where everyone in the town arrives at the same time in the same place to hear incriminating evidence that forces the dastardly villains to abandon their plans. Oops, I gave away the ending, if you were expecting that the film would conclude with the death of the owls.