The Hills Have Eyes



In my capacity as America’s foremost hickologist, I felt obligated to see this remake so that I’ll be prepared when the big money offers start rolling in for the revised and updated edition of my book. And indeed, there was some reason to believe it might actually be watchable; I did have some good things to say about director Alexander Aja’s previous excursion into horror, High Tension.

Hills gets off to a promising start with a credits sequence that’s like a three-minute version of The Atomic Café, but what follows isn’t much of an improvement on the overrated original. The set-up is basically the same: a family traveling across country stops for directions at a creepy gas station in the desert (thus proving they did not read my “Top 10 Things I Learned From My Day of Hillbilly Horror”, specifically #6: “The old man at the gas station? He's in on it, too.”) He directs them to a supposed shortcut that instead leads them into a deathtrap set by a family of cannibalistic mutants. Oops!

Aja has taken the curiously popular approach of assembling a group of characters ranging from the mildly irksome to the downright repugnant, so that, rather than rooting for anyone, we are left to simply sort them into the order we would most like them to be disemboweled. The makeup and gore effects are, of course, a technical improvement on the impoverished original, although no prosthetics can adequately replace the immortal mug of Michael Berryman.



The only major change is the addition of an “atomic village” in the third act, a setting lifted from the killer hillbilly movie Brad Pitt leaves off his resume, Kalifornia. Someday a great movie will take place in such a location. This is not that movie. My only question now is whether the inevitable sequel will actually be a remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Part II, with its motocross plot and doggie flashbacks. Because that I’d definitely have to see.

Bad Company

Not the 2002 buddy movie with Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins, but rather the 1972 buddy movie starring Jeff Bridges and someone named Barry Brown who would eventually do guest shots on Alice and Barnaby Jones. Actually it’s a buddy movie and a road movie and a western and sometimes thinks it’s a comedy and sometimes thinks it’s a groovy counterculture flick. Brown is Drew Dixon, a goody two-shoes who falls in with a gang of young roughneck wannabes while heading west to escape conscription into the Union Army. Bridges is Jake, the charming but duplicitous leader of this mild bunch. The movie is episodic and the pieces don’t always fit together – there are some jarring shifts in tone – but it’s an agreeable enough journey.

Freedomland



This movie is shitdiculous. I can’t blame Richard Price, who wrote the screenplay based on his novel, because I’ve just checked out director Joe Roth’s resume on IMDb and learned that he is the man behind Christmas with the Kranks and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise. Let’s blame him. This one goes off the rails early on, when detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel Jackson) questions a woman who has just been carjacked, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore). When he learns her son was in the back seat, the movie suddenly throws a nutty –the camera’s swinging around, the music starts blaring, everyone’s shrieking and bugging their eyes, Jackson’s taking hits off an asthma inhaler and gasping for breath – and from that moment on, Freedomland is pitched at a level of hysteria so high, only dogs can hear it.

There is a brief oasis, about an hour in, when Edie Falco shows up and restores some dignity to the proceedings. In fact, she has one quietly intense scene that's so tremendous, for a second I thought she'd singlehandedly saved the movie. Alas, this is followed up by its polar opposite, an endless horrendous monologue by Julianne Moore that made me feel like I'd been dragged to some horrific off-off-Broadway one-woman show. (This has got to be her worst performance, by a long shot.) Then the big race riot breaks out. It’s just a little overstated for my liking.