My Hills Have Eyes review.
Going to Part Chimp and the Oxford Collapse tonight in L-ville. Should be loud as fuck.
Saw the Hill Have Eyes.
So basically my understanding is that the majority of the people who will be going to see this film have a)never heard of the original or b)heard of it vaguely during the movie hype but never seen it. Depending on how you look at it, you will probably never have needed to seen the original if you just want action and gore, but if you actually care about story and character development, you'll probably get lost. In the original, we are introduced not only to the good American family but also the surviving "bad" American family which serves as their antithesis. Wes Craven familiarizes us with the the Jupiter family, actually developing those characters, giving the audience a glimpse into their world and motives, which doing whatever they can to survive in the harsh climate of the desert. They are just as weak and fallible as the normal family themselves, providing them some humanity. This gets at Craven's main motif of to what extent people will go to survive; the battle of two families to see who will survive. The lines are blurred between who is really good and who is really bad. In Alexandra Aja's version, we really do not get that sense of character development for the Jupiter family. In fact if you hadn't seen the original, you probably wouldn't know who Pluto, Mercury, Mars, or Jupiter are at all. I've read that Aja purposely wanted to leave these characters as esoteric and secretive to show how the Carter family is fighting against an unknown force, in effect making it "scarier", but it also makes the Jupiter family seem more like props and simplistic monsters for the Carter family to battle and defeat as opposed to just another family trying to survive. The remake becomes more like a battle of good vs. evil than a battle of two abandoned families and the lengths they'll go to survive. It's fully clear throughout the movie who the real good guys are, stripping away the grey area and moral relativism that surrounds the original and undercutting Wes Craven's main themes.
Case in point, let's take Pluto. In the original, Pluto, as played by Michael Berryman, looks incredibly frightening (and this without Greg Nicotero's makeup), but in reality is just as scared as the any other human being. In remake, Pluto is a behemoth, almost like Goliath. He has superhuman strength and can withstand being impaled by sharp end of a broken baseball bat through the torso. It takes Doug almost becoming superhuman himself (after withstanding being pummeled into walls and having several of his fingers chopped off) to defeat the beast, almost making seems exactly like a battle between David and Goliath. The new audience, unfamiliar with the original story probably wouldn't have know the hulking monstrosity that Doug battles is Pluto to begin with. In the original, Pluto gets taken out by Beast, the family dog, showing that despite how scary he looks, he's quite weak as well.
Basically this movie makes the Jupiter family out to be more like a Firefly family (House of a 1000 Corpses, Devil Rejects) and Sawyer family, psychos who kill more for pleasure than survival. Yes, Ajas introduces us to the fact that they are the suriving remants of a mining family abandoned and mutated due to nuclear testing, but he doesn't development this points at all, chosing to emphasis them more as psychos (with houses in the abandoned nuclear testing town reminiscent of the Firefly house full of dead bodies and rotting limbs) than people trying to survive. Also the Jupiter family in the original lived in caves, not houses, emphasising even more their need for survival.
With all that said, Aja is a masterful director, not a writer. He has a keen eye for lighting, and photography, and his camera work plays to the emotions. The scene where Mercury and Pluto rape one of the Carter daughters and kill the mother and the other daughter draws more of gutteral action this time around as opposed to the original. This scene had more of an exploitative effect reminiscent of Craven's first real feature, Last House on the Left, than the original Hills was capable of doing. Aja is able to create incredible atmosphere, even using music that smears of 70s horror, shaky camera angles that feel more like one's field of vision, and use of chiascuro in light that gives one grand feelings of despair. The effects and make up are incredible and superbly done by Greg Nicotero (a protege of Tom Savini's who got his start while doing Day of the Dead)who pretty much does everything nowadays. So in a recap of that, everything technical and completely divorced from plot and narrative is dead on and perfect.
Overall, once again Aja proves that he's got a keen eye for photography and the technical aspects of directing, but not for storytelling. I think people should watch both to get a full understanding and appreciation of the full story. Everyone keep in mind that the original Hills was a big movie during my childhood and is kind of important to me, so that's why I've gone so in depth with it. I will be asking Michael Berryman's thoughts of the new movies when I get to meet him next weekend.
Saw the Hill Have Eyes.
So basically my understanding is that the majority of the people who will be going to see this film have a)never heard of the original or b)heard of it vaguely during the movie hype but never seen it. Depending on how you look at it, you will probably never have needed to seen the original if you just want action and gore, but if you actually care about story and character development, you'll probably get lost. In the original, we are introduced not only to the good American family but also the surviving "bad" American family which serves as their antithesis. Wes Craven familiarizes us with the the Jupiter family, actually developing those characters, giving the audience a glimpse into their world and motives, which doing whatever they can to survive in the harsh climate of the desert. They are just as weak and fallible as the normal family themselves, providing them some humanity. This gets at Craven's main motif of to what extent people will go to survive; the battle of two families to see who will survive. The lines are blurred between who is really good and who is really bad. In Alexandra Aja's version, we really do not get that sense of character development for the Jupiter family. In fact if you hadn't seen the original, you probably wouldn't know who Pluto, Mercury, Mars, or Jupiter are at all. I've read that Aja purposely wanted to leave these characters as esoteric and secretive to show how the Carter family is fighting against an unknown force, in effect making it "scarier", but it also makes the Jupiter family seem more like props and simplistic monsters for the Carter family to battle and defeat as opposed to just another family trying to survive. The remake becomes more like a battle of good vs. evil than a battle of two abandoned families and the lengths they'll go to survive. It's fully clear throughout the movie who the real good guys are, stripping away the grey area and moral relativism that surrounds the original and undercutting Wes Craven's main themes.
Case in point, let's take Pluto. In the original, Pluto, as played by Michael Berryman, looks incredibly frightening (and this without Greg Nicotero's makeup), but in reality is just as scared as the any other human being. In remake, Pluto is a behemoth, almost like Goliath. He has superhuman strength and can withstand being impaled by sharp end of a broken baseball bat through the torso. It takes Doug almost becoming superhuman himself (after withstanding being pummeled into walls and having several of his fingers chopped off) to defeat the beast, almost making seems exactly like a battle between David and Goliath. The new audience, unfamiliar with the original story probably wouldn't have know the hulking monstrosity that Doug battles is Pluto to begin with. In the original, Pluto gets taken out by Beast, the family dog, showing that despite how scary he looks, he's quite weak as well.
Basically this movie makes the Jupiter family out to be more like a Firefly family (House of a 1000 Corpses, Devil Rejects) and Sawyer family, psychos who kill more for pleasure than survival. Yes, Ajas introduces us to the fact that they are the suriving remants of a mining family abandoned and mutated due to nuclear testing, but he doesn't development this points at all, chosing to emphasis them more as psychos (with houses in the abandoned nuclear testing town reminiscent of the Firefly house full of dead bodies and rotting limbs) than people trying to survive. Also the Jupiter family in the original lived in caves, not houses, emphasising even more their need for survival.
With all that said, Aja is a masterful director, not a writer. He has a keen eye for lighting, and photography, and his camera work plays to the emotions. The scene where Mercury and Pluto rape one of the Carter daughters and kill the mother and the other daughter draws more of gutteral action this time around as opposed to the original. This scene had more of an exploitative effect reminiscent of Craven's first real feature, Last House on the Left, than the original Hills was capable of doing. Aja is able to create incredible atmosphere, even using music that smears of 70s horror, shaky camera angles that feel more like one's field of vision, and use of chiascuro in light that gives one grand feelings of despair. The effects and make up are incredible and superbly done by Greg Nicotero (a protege of Tom Savini's who got his start while doing Day of the Dead)who pretty much does everything nowadays. So in a recap of that, everything technical and completely divorced from plot and narrative is dead on and perfect.
Overall, once again Aja proves that he's got a keen eye for photography and the technical aspects of directing, but not for storytelling. I think people should watch both to get a full understanding and appreciation of the full story. Everyone keep in mind that the original Hills was a big movie during my childhood and is kind of important to me, so that's why I've gone so in depth with it. I will be asking Michael Berryman's thoughts of the new movies when I get to meet him next weekend.