Did you know that nuclear weapons are bad? No, really -- not only do they kill innocent people, but they also mutate people who then go on to kill other innocent people. So the next time you want to set off a nuke, have a heart and consider the mutants. Or at least, consider the happy American family that will suffer the wrath of the mutants when they happen to pass through the New Mexico desert.
This seems to be the big lesson that Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes has to teach, and, dammit, it does a wonderful job, especially considering how difficult it is to grasp the dangers of nuclear warfare (please note the sarcasm). The politics of Hills (or rather, politic, because the movie only has one point) is made even more obvious by the images of mushroom clouds and horribly deformed babies displayed against '50s true-blue American pop music.
But, unfortunately, a political agenda is not what audiences want from a horror film. In fact, audiences want to be scared by a horror film. But Hills does not manage to accomplish this elementary feat either. In fact, the only entertaining thing about this remake of the 1977 Wes Craven film is the mutant who looks amusingly like Freddy Krueger. And that clinches it: this movie really is a nightmare.
