A fine balance is drunkenly walked between condemnation and glorification of violence in Alexandre Aja's remake of 1977's flaccid The Hills Have Eyes, which remains the story of a large family travelling through New Mexico on their way to California who are taken for prey by a ravenous cabal of cannibals living in the desert. Much depends on how alert, compassionate, and generous its audience is because Aja doesn't makes it easy for them to discern how his film should be taken. Despite its slick sheen of bloody carnage and the ample attention paid to the family's fatal descent, there are enough hints to suggest that they and their tormentors are not quite dissimilar, confounding our own set of values as we are given to identify with the family. So, while many will leave feeling that the heroes won and the villains got what was coming to them, and those of the geek show variety of horror fans are sure to froth over the gore, such people will have sadly overlooked the point he is trying to make. Rather, it is those who feel sympathy for both parties in the film and rightfully regard each as victims who will likely experience the fullest extent of the terror contained herein.

At its core, The Hills Have Eyes is about the imperialistic and subsequently debilitating nature of aggression and vengeance, which is unusually lofty for the deservedly oft-derided horror genre. Aja adds an allegorical dimension to the original story by interpolating the history of actual nuclear weapons tests conducted by the American government on its desert soil and fantasizing about a group of miners who refused to evacuate their homes for the sake of war-related expenditures, suffering drastic mutations from the resulting radiation poisoning. Since forgotten, restricted to caves and a desolate mock village built as part of the government's research into the effects of a nuclear blast, they've been forced to subsist on passers-by that they trap and devour with the help of a soul-sick gas attendant with whom they appear to have struck an accord. They exist only to seethe and fester from anger, and in their raw form represent the manifest ugliness of violence, though they are arguably not evil. Understandably outraged, harbouring a murderous resentment of their oppressors akin to that shared by similarly invaded and ambushed peoples in their reactions to American interference (e.g., North Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis), the mutants instead elicit pity for brief moments of mercy and tenderness amidst their virulently-charged retribution.

When the Carter family arrive - bold, brash, and sniping at one another under the embrace of the American flag hoisted atop their vehicle - they are foolish enough to veer off-map, taking them directly into harm's way. They conversely lose favour for their petty hostility toward one another, adding to their deliberate sense of culpability. Metaphorically, American might-and-right is pitted against its legacy of castigated outsiders, and though members of the Carter family do get eaten by the mutants, the idea is that we cannibalize ourselves when we attack fellow people. In this sense, The Hills Have Eyes can also be seen as a loose interpretation of Sam Peckinpah's 1971 grimly realistic revenge classic Straw Dogs, which is explicitly synthesized during the film's final act. Both argue that nobody gets to be the hero in a violent conflict, even if for the sake of survival, because we are all in a way monsters, and it's to Aja's credit that he capitalizes on this figurative horror by taking it very literally.

Though Aja's artistic reach is commendable, The Hills Have Eyes ultimately stumbles in the way it lazily falls back on hacky formula tropes and freely cribs from other films. By now this sort of story is so familiar that most filmgoers will reasonably predict the outcome and become detached from the narrative. When that happens, all that's left to soak in is the visual orgy of slaughter. Aja confusingly, yet probably commercially, panders to devotees of schlock and celebrates the very behaviour he's denouncing; for instance, when one of the mutants is mortally wounded with an American flag, how many will take notice of its intended irony? The result is a frustrating display of repugnant power on behalf of the travelling family that risks obfuscating his more meaningful underlying message. Being an inexperienced filmmaker, though, Aja's missteps are surely part of his learning curve, and after seeing this film I am confident that in due time he will find the right mix for something truly great.

(The Hills Have Eyes is currently playing at the Crystal Palace 8 Cinemas, located at 499 Paul St. in Dieppe.)