Run from ‘The Hills’

The hills are alive with the sound of gurgled breathing in Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 film “The Hills Have Eyes.” And it’s a good thing, because the film’s excellent use of surround sound is probably the only reason to see it.

The movie’s problems begin with its generic protagonists, the Carter family. There’s the gruff, gun-toting dad, the nice mom, the spoiled daughter, the son whose pants hover permanently mid-buttocks, the nice older sister, the city-slicker brother-in-law, the baby ? all of whom experience a family road trip and inevitable attack by misshapen cannibals, etc. As audiences soon find out, it’s just hard to care about cookie-cutter characters, whether they’re burned alive, have their fingers sliced off or are humped by drooling mutants. Really. You’d be surprised.

The film’s setup for the ensuing gore (a.k.a., the plot) is foreboding enough: The family stops at a dusty, isolated gas station whose decrepit attendant has just received a bag filled with stolen goods and a hacked-off ear in a to-go box. The outhouse receives a strange jolt while the son is inside. A mysterious creature emitting unearthly, childlike noises steals a sweatshirt from the car.

On the old man’s recommendation, the family takes a shortcut down a one-lane dirt road to nowhere, clearly demonstrating their evolutionary unfitness for survival. And wouldn’t you know it, they break an axle. Cue superb use of surround sound, gurgles and strange creatures with inexplicably high-tech binoculars.

Dad and husband set off in opposite directions to look for help. While they are gone, the rest of the family is attacked by what we discover are a band of bloodthirsty mutants. Several family members meet an early end. It’s slightly shocking that they’re killed off so soon. But then again, who really cares? We just met them.

Clearly, getting to know the characters isn’t the point, since the plot is nothing more than a setup for “the gore ? ah yes, the glorious gore,” as one viewer wrote on the Internet Movie Database website.

When the mutants steal ? oh, god, no ? the baby, it’s up to hubby Doug to overcome his city-slickerness and reclaim her. His search leads him into a village used by the government in the nuclear testing that spawned these mutants. Full of fire-scarred mannequins grinning into the dust, the town offers a striking image that is unfortunately dulled by the insipid nature of its slobbering inhabitants.

As with the cookie-cutter-Carters, writers Aja and Grégory Levasseur (who share writing credits with Craven) have made their monsters from a one-dimensional mold.

The title hints at a mysterious, watchful people ? are they superhuman or are they secretly like us? Are they purely evil, or are we partly to blame for their condition? But a more accurate title would be “The Hills Have Ugly, Mutant People with No Redeeming Qualities,” because any potentially interesting nuances are either ignored or acknowledged with the most cursory of gestures.

Dispensing with character and nuance and plot devices other than kill-and-try-not-to-be-killed clearly backfired on Aja. When a pick was driven through one character’s eye, the audience actually started laughing. Which made me wonder if the whole movie was supposed to be funny. Which would surely mean that the apocalypse is nigh.

But then again, this movie was made for people who enjoy utterly gratuitous violence. And for the rest of us, there’s always the surround sound.