Hills have eyes, the

Wes Craven made a hit horror movie in the 1970s, The Hills Have Eyes. Three decades later, after watching a bandwagon of horror remakes making fortunes for other people, he jumped on it too, taking on board a duo of proven French horror-movie talents. Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur had established their European reputation for writing-directing bloodthirstiness with Haute Tension in 2003, and no one doubted their ability to deliver a technically adroit remake and update.

Morocco provided the vast stark "New Mexico" desert in which a white family of four adults, two teens, a baby and a pair of Alsatians get lost, deliberately misdirected into the feeding grounds of a subterranean gang of genetically deformed nuclear test victims.

The cinematography is excellent, and the whole cast (even the manufactured freaks) are unusually acceptable actors for what is nothing more than a souped-up B-grade horror movie. Editing, music, and the striking special effects are also well above average, but the movie has been fairly damned as porno horror.

The deaths and ordeals of the characters, especially the women, do verge on the pornographic, but they lose the essential frisson of a true horror movie. Consequently I lost any interest in seeing what further creatively gory setpieces might have been devised by the movie-makers. By the time I switched off physically as well as mentally, the only mildly engaging aspect was wondering which character would be slaughtered next.

The Frenchmen may have found their niche with their more recent Piranha remake: incredibly corny and self-mocking humour allied with sensational SFX.