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"'The Hills Have Eyes': Avoid this one like a toxic-waste dump
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
"Something is not right around here," a teenage boy observes of the eerily barren desert in The Hills Have Eyes. It's worse than that. Nothing is right about this ridiculous horror schlockfest.

There is a strange lack of tension and no real jolts of fear in this remake of the 1977 Wes Craven film about a family traveling through the New Mexico desert who are terrorized by deformed, flesh-eating mutants. But there is plenty of gore.

The movie also has one of the queasiest rape sequences in recent memory. The teenage victim is understandably traumatized, but after screaming and crying incoherently all night, the next day she is industrious and capable, as if the attack by two monstrous fiends never happened.

Ted Levine and Kathleen Quinlan star as a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary with their two teens, a twentysomething daughter, her husband, their baby and a couple of German shepherds. Little wonder that nobody appears eager to take this road trip across the southwest to San Diego.

After stopping at a decrepit gas station, they take the creepy attendant's advice on a shortcut and end up broken down in a desolate area after hidden spikes in the road trash their tires.

The family becomes fodder for the zombie-like killers who live in the hills, smack in the middle of an abandoned nuclear-testing site. (One of the mutants bears an uncanny resemblance to Keith Richards.)

The movie ricochets between relentless savagery, lulls between attacks and plans for revenge. When the family patriarch doesn't return after walking into town for help, the son-in-law tells the teenage boy that if Dad doesn't return by midnight, they'll go out looking for him.

Of course. Skulking about a threatening desert late at night is always a smart plan.

The son-in-law, a nerdy cellphone salesman who is staunchly against guns, viciously takes on the mutated monsters, proving himself ludicrously indomitable. He finds weapons in the darndest places and uses them mercilessly. More incredibly, he continues to fight after he is repeatedly and horrifically attacked.

Don't expect logic, coherence or even resolution here. The film borrows from TV's Lost with its cliffhanger style. For the sequel, perhaps a weekend getaway to Three Mile Island?"