I definitely prefer the original, not to say that this one isn't alright. I felt, however, it was intentionally OVERTLY gory. I've seen many horror films and handled quite a bit of on-screen violence, but this left me dazed and feeling a bit sick. The original implied a lot, which made it atmospheric - this one outright showed it. The opening credits are jarring, with clips of deformed bodies in jars. That was one thing I didn't like: the way that this movie over-did the nuclear testing aspect. In the original, it was implied that the fall-out from the test range affected the family (Papa Jupiter is the son of the gas station attendant who buried a crowbar into his face and left him in the desert when he killed his mother; Jupiter in turn found a hooker and started a family on the Nellis Airforce Test Range in the Mojave desert in Nevada). In the original, Doug does say that he found abandoned houses in a crater, but they actually show it in this film. There are more "mutants" in this one (there's a guy with a severely swollen head in a wheelchair, children, an obese woman in a house, etc) that are unexplained and were not in the original. I do not like what was done with Ruby, because she actually has a character in the original, she speaks and proves that she is not savage like her family (thank you Janus Blythe!). Giving Doug the same hair and mustache was an interesting touch, and overall the Carter family had the same sort of "feel" and general look as the original. I don't like how Bobby was turned into a kid as opposed to a wise teenager. There was no need to change the character of Mars to "Lizard." Pluto looked like a rehash of Sloth from The Goonies (Michael Berryman will ALWAYS be Pluto). I would suggest anyone who liked this seek out the original and see how it was meant to be.
Review of The Hills Have Eyes
