I’m going to leave the remake discussion out of this because the people who hate remakes are never going to be swayed and it’s not even worth trying. I know people who refuse to watch the new Dawn of the Dead even though it’s an entirely different movie, and arguably a damn good one. That said, Wes Craven’s original Hills implies a lot, while this version actually shows it to you. But that’s what you expected, right?

First off – there were far too many, force scares in the first part of it. You know, building tension and then a cat jumps out and makes the audience jump kind of stuff. This is a scary idea, and a scary movie and I’m not sure why those kind of carnival pranks were thrown in. It made it really hard to get into the groove of the flick. However once it got past those, and into the meat of the story things improved considerably. Some of the stranded family members were so annoying you actually wanted them to get killed, and when they did it was rather satisfying. Watching it you could definitely sense that they were being watched and they knew it. And the mutants were fantastic.

What wasn’t fantastic and where the whole thing fell apart in my perspective was when Doug finds the town. A town full of mannequins that has been through a nuclear blast and abandoned for at least 50 years is creepy. A mutant family living in the midst of it is really creepy. A mutant family living in a house full of mannequins that has been hit with a nuclear blast and abandoned for at least 50 years who never touched or changed anything is bullshit. Especially when one of those mutants (who looked like Chunk from The Goonies) has already shown that the littlest think will set him off and cause him to smash everything in sight. In one scene when they run through the living room the table still has a picture perfect place setting that was clearly from the testing days. O RLY? This mutant family has been living here for all these years and they never moved a single plate? Sure they rig up generators and fill one room with a hundred TV, they install a meat cooler to store chopped off body parts but they don’t move a stupid mannequin off the stairs so they don’t have to walk around it to get to the second floor?

I found myself thinking “Oh come on” and “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me” more times than I’d like to during a horror movie. Of course blood drenched Doug does turn it around the beat some serious mutant ass so I can’t really complain too much. I also liked that this version didn’t show as much of the mutants chatting each other up as the original which made them seem a bit more mysterious and a lot scarier. Except for the Chunk looking one, I just wanted someone to give him a Baby Ruth.

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