Sometimes Hollywood remakes a horror classic and breathes new life into it. Other times, Hollywood takes Wes Craven’s 1977 grindhouse shocker, feeds it radioactive sludge, and spits out The Hills Have Eyes (2006)—a movie that manages to be both brutally violent and brutally stupid. Alexandre Aja directed this remake, which promised savage scares and instead delivered two hours of watching a dysfunctional family argue while radioactive hillbillies cosplay as Leatherface.
Plot? More Like Pit Stop
The Carter family is driving through the New Mexico desert, celebrating their silver wedding anniversary in the most depressing way possible: by dragging their entire brood and two German Shepherds into government-tested wasteland. The gas station attendant (whose résumé must just say “Shifty Old Guy”) sends them down a “shortcut.” Pro tip: in horror movies, never take advice from someone who looks like they’ve been hiding corpses under the floorboards since the Eisenhower administration.
Sure enough, the family’s car and trailer get spiked and wrecked, stranding them in a desert that apparently doubles as America’s buffet line for cannibal mutants. From there, it’s just ninety minutes of nuclear-deformed yokels tormenting the Carters, while we the audience wonder what we did to deserve this.
Meet the Cannibal Mutants: America’s Worst HOA
The mutants are supposedly the result of U.S. nuclear testing, but let’s be honest: they look less like fallout victims and more like Spirit Halloween employees who got locked in the mask aisle overnight.
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Papa Jupiter: The leader, who looks like someone crossed a biker with a blowfish.
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Pluto: The hulking thug who lumbers around like Jason Voorhees but with less charm.
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Lizard: The creepiest of the bunch, whose hobbies include rape, arson, and general Saturday-night slasher behavior.
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Big Brain: Stuck in a wheelchair with a giant noggin, proof that even mutants need someone to deliver exposition.
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Ruby: The “good” mutant, which in this movie just means she’s the only one not actively trying to barbecue a baby.
Watching these characters is like sitting through a rejected X-Men pilot where everyone’s mutant power is “bad teeth and worse dialogue.”
The Carter Family: Darwin Awards in Human Form
The Carters are less a family unit and more a traveling argument.
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Big Bob (Ted Levine): A retired cop who takes his family into mutant country because nothing says “anniversary” like potential cannibalism.
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Ethel: The obligatory mom whose entire personality is “Please don’t fight, kids!” Spoiler: they fight anyway.
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Lynn, Brenda, and Bobby: The kids, who spend most of the movie bickering or screaming. Brenda gets the worst of it, thanks to a truly gross trailer invasion scene.
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Doug (Aaron Stanford): Lynn’s husband, a liberal pacifist who becomes the movie’s accidental Rambo. Watching him transform from “guy who sells cell phones” to “blood-soaked avenger” is less character development and more Stockholm Syndrome with machetes.
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The Baby: Because horror films can’t resist putting an infant in mortal danger.
Every bad decision in this movie is fueled by Carter family logic: “Let’s split up in the desert at night. What could go wrong?” Answer: everything.
The Dogs Deserve Better
The only characters with intelligence are Beauty and Beast, the family’s German Shepherds. Beauty gets killed early, but Beast goes full John Wick, ripping mutants apart and becoming the true hero of the story. If this movie had been 90 minutes of Beast tearing through radioactive cannibals, I’d be giving it an Oscar campaign. Instead, we get Beast as comic relief wedged between human incompetence.
Violence for Violence’s Sake
Let’s talk about the gore, because that’s clearly what Aja was banking on. The film was initially rated NC-17, and I can see why—this movie wallows in sadism like it’s trying to win a medal. Burning, stabbing, decapitations, a rape scene, and about twenty gallons of fake blood later, and you don’t feel scared—you feel like you need a shower.
The infamous trailer scene, where the mutants invade, is supposed to be shocking. And it is—shocking in the sense that you wonder how anyone thought this was entertainment instead of a dare. Instead of tension, it just feels exploitative, like Aja was trying to gross you out so badly you’d confuse it for horror.
Dumb Decisions, Dumber Writing
The biggest horror here isn’t the mutants. It’s the screenplay. Characters run into caves full of bones like it’s a guided tour. They scream each other’s names while hiding, because stealth is for people with IQs above room temperature. And they repeatedly split up, because apparently no one in this family has ever seen Scooby-Doo, let alone a horror movie.
Doug’s transformation from whining son-in-law to desert warrior is laughable. One minute he’s panicking about his wife’s death, the next he’s using a pickaxe and shotgun like he’s starring in Mad Max: Baby Retrieval. By the finale, he’s covered in blood, holding his infant, and glaring into the camera like an Abercrombie model who fell into a slaughterhouse.
The Ending: Mutant Binoculars of Doom
The movie ends with Doug, Brenda, Bobby, the baby, and Beast surviving. They embrace, thinking it’s finally over. And then—because horror remakes can’t resist cheap sequel bait—we see another mutant watching them through binoculars. Apparently cannibal hillbillies have access to military-grade optics but not basic dental hygiene. Roll credits.
Dark Humor Takeaways
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The title should’ve been The Hills Have Brains… Just Not in the Script.
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If nuclear fallout really made people this horny for baby stew, the Cold War would’ve looked a lot different.
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The family dog has a higher survival rate and more personality than half the human cast.
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At least the mutants recycle—they’ve got a whole crater full of stolen cars. Eco-friendly cannibalism!
Final Verdict: Radioactive Roadkill
The Hills Have Eyes (2006) wants to be shocking, raw, and terrifying. Instead, it’s grimy, joyless, and dumb. The gore is over the top, the writing is undercooked, and the only thing scarier than the mutants is the idea that this movie made enough money to spawn a sequel.
It’s not horror—it’s misery porn with a body count. If you want to feel nauseated and depressed, just watch C-SPAN.
