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It wasn't that long ago when I was curled into the fetal position, crying softly into a couch pillow. It was much easier to do this than sit through the Amityville remake, perhaps the most contrived and blatantly uncreative of the new batch of horrors. While in this state of despair, I wondered if The Hills Have Eyes would ever see a remake as well? After Marcus Nispel's boring remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's the new vogue to make violent but bland revivals of seventies horror movies. And not long after that the news broke: a new Eyes movie is on its way.

Should fans have panicked? It depends how you want to look at The Hills Have Eyes. How the remake came to being is worth knowing. After seeing the violent slasher homage Haute Tension (High Tension), Wes Craven approached its director, the young Alexandre Aja, to remake his 1977 classic. The Hills Have Eyes is regarded as a spiritual successor to Last House On the Left, Craven's first movie, and remains a cult classic that hardcore horror fans are very familiar with. A family going through a stretch of the Mojave desert is sent down the wrong road where a different family of in-breeding cannibals proceed to slaughter them. But as in any good horror, the victims start fighting back, climaxing into one of the most visually disturbing horrors of that period. The movie also started a fun rivalry between Craven and Sam “Spider-Man” Raimi, who placed torn posters of the opposing director's movies in some of their films (there is a torn Hills poster in the basement of Evil Dead, which in turn appeared torn in Nightmare on Elm Street). Craven chose Aja because his slasher was impressive. Haute Tension wasn't much of a vehicle for a story, deep characters or even coherency. An infamous scene cut out of most of the film's releases completely contradicts the final conclusion (the scene wasn't cut for this reason and appears in some edits, including the unrated cut). But it showed Aja's understanding of horror, so much so that Craven hailed him as the harbinger for new creature features.

It's perhaps ironic to note that Steven King said the same about Clive Barker; while Barker is a genius in his own right, he wasn't the new face of horror. Are the praises sung for Aja premature? That depends on what you want out of a modern horror. The new movie stays fairly faithful to the original material. A family sets out for vacation to Los Angeles, but manage to get sent down the wrong road by the creepy owner of the local gas station. At this point the script has briefly introduced the family, but not before opening the movie with an obligatory and quite spectacular killing sequence. In fact, this opening bit get the movie off on a great start. Soon after the credits (which explain where the bad guys are from, though Aja figured that the audience needed to be reminded of this non-crucial fact a second time in a later scene) roll and we met our family filled with cliches, things go south. The car gets totaled and our family is stranded in the middle of the desert. And they have problems – there is a camera darting about the rocks, looking at them and breathing heavily. Soon the killing starts, though in the fashion of the original the tension is kept fairly well and most of the dramatic moments happen close to each other.

But Aja's ability to stay true to things horror goes too far. The Hills Have Eyes is also riddled with incomprehensibly bad cliches and timing that are bound to offend stoic slasher fans. It will definitely get a rise out of audiences who thought The Ring was intelligent horror, since chords are struck at apt times, usually right after watching a camera stalk a good guy (but turns out to be another good guy walking up behind him). These moments happen so often that they ruin the overall tempo of the movie. The characters are also very shallow and predictable, which causes a problem for a movie that relies on the tension of its character freaking out. The dogs are back and they were the stars of the show for me – it's impossible to develop any real empathy with any other character in the movie.

But perhaps that has to do with seeing the original. Still, there are many daft horror cliches in the remake that would even put Amityville to shame. In fact, out of the new bloods only the Exorcist remake was more contrived.

So why watch two hours of predictable horror footnotes? The gore. Aja, is anything, understands the basic need behind a good slasher: impressive, comical, terrifying gore. It's not a movie that will satiate gore hounds, but The Hills Have Eyes pushes the blood and guts further than other recent releases (House of Wax, Final Destination 3). Using clever camera angles and great sound, a lot of the kills are visceral and terrifying. The body count is relatively high and most of the characters meet a nasty and untimely end. The gore side is quite extreme and contains visual imagery that definitely isn't for the faint hearted. Honestly, I would hate this movie on principle if it weren't for the delicious variety of slasher deaths on offer, something that is still more miss than hit in today's psycho movies.

The movie also has a hidden treat. Unlike the original, these cannibals are tied to atomic tests done by the military in the region. It's a flimsy premise, but it involves a town – one which our unlikely survivors find towards the end. This brings more to a part that felt neglected in the first film, though just as in Last House on the Left Craven wasn't as interested in origins as the sheer horror of the situation. Truly, to be stranded in the desert with cannibals out for your blood is a really terrifying premise. Making them mutants from government meddling doesn't add much depth, but the addition of the semi-abandoned town give that aspect a bit more substance (relatively speaking) and lets Aja take the movie away from being just a remake of the original.. This isn't a sequel – there in no canon to speak of – but it was a nice touch and also made for a thoroughly spectacular ending.

Then Aja fucks it up with the most ridiculous ending chorus ever.

So it's a mixed bag. The Hills Have Eyes is the best of the recent batch of remakes and it has a lot of charm in its gore, camera work and intense red environment. The overall execution is great and it is a scary and violent film. In one way Aja defines a cutting edge for mainstream horror cinema. Then he ruins a lot of his work with an incredible amount of mistakes and 'tension builders' that suck away a lot of the experience. It not that you need to be a timing genius or a Pulitzer-awarded writer to make a horror, but there are some things you don't do. The Hills Have Eyes were given the wrong list in that regard.