The Hills Have Eyes

In 1977, long before Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream cemented his status as the master of modern horror, director Wes Craven created The Hills Have Eyes, a low-budget genre masterpiece. Nearly 30 years later, Craven returns to one of his best films, but this time he turns over the directing reigns to Alexandre Aja (of last year’s slice-and-dice French import, High Tension). The rough outline of the original story is the same: A dysfunctional family piles into an RV and heads across the country, but when their camper gets stuck in a nuclear testing ground, the freaks come out to feast. Gore connoisseurs will be happy—Aja's Hills jacks up the body count with bash-your-brains-in slayings, but sadly, the plot and tension end up drowning in the buckets of blood spilled on-screen. The film’s ad line warns: “The lucky ones die first.” Actually, the lucky ones should just wait for the DVD.