Alexandre Aja’s remake of my favorite Wes Craven film is nothing if not faithful to the original. For the first hour of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), it even seems to use the same script as The Hills Have Eyes (1977), with the exception that these characters have cell phones. Of course, cell phones don’t work in the desert, so there is little to distinguish this film from that. It is this, the film’s inability to become its own movie, which keeps The Hills Have Eyes (2006) from being one of the best horror films I’ve seen in years.

Between 1945 and 1962, the opening titles tell us, the United States government conducted over 300 nuclear tests in the Southwestern deserts of America. Tests that probably weren’t good for any humans living near the radiation-infested grounds. If we take our lessons from comic books and the Japanese, the only result of this would probably be benign superheroes and giant rubber lizards.

In The Hills Have Eyes, however, the radiation poisoned generations of children, giving them horrible birth defects and warping their minds, turning what would’ve otherwise been a slightly creepy family of hicks into mass-murdering freaks. Apparently, in Aja’s version, they also got the super strength that characters in the Marvel universe so handily discovered radiation can give you (its one of the things that distinguishes his film from Craven’s). This provides a good excuse for the Mike Meyers-type I’m-still-alive-even-though-you-shot-me-in-the-neck scenes later in the film, so I can’t complain.

A family lost in the desert is subjected to the perverse will of the family of mutants when they have a blow out near a group of hills. There are rapes and crucifixions and murders and fires and kidnapping and blood. Lots and lots of blood. And though my stomach was clenched in disgust for much of the film, I loved every second of the horrible, unspeakable, over-the-top violence, which is what horror movies are all about.

Less time is spent developing the characters of the freaks in the hills in this film than in the original (another one of the film’s few distinguishing characteristics), which leaves time for more gory scenes of suspense and action as the lost family takes revenge for what the freaks have done. The film has a political message somewhere, about nuclear bombs and nuclear families (get it?), but it really gets lost when you start cheering as Doug (Aaron Stanford) puts an axe in Pluto’s (Michael Bailey Smith) head. Of course, Aja knows that few people these days go to horror movies for political messages, so just touching on these issues is enough.

Though the film distinguishes itself with an increased level of gore and a change of scenery or two, it seemed too much like I’d seen it all before for me to thoroughly enjoy it. Also, nothing can top the screen presence or remarkable appearance of cult icon Michael Berryman, who became the star of the original film for his unique look (he was born, he says, with 39 physical birth defects). And even if the film is unoriginal, even if it seems to suggest that we should be afraid of the physically deformed, it is a simple and scary horror flick that comes highly recommended from me – but only after you’ve seen the original.