*for the purposes of the essay, the "man" in question is the homicidal maniac chasing you.
SPOILER WARNING 
As I watched the recent remake of The Hills Have Eyes, I began to notice a weird but distinct trend in recent films. One of the protagonists ends up getting a couple of fingers severed in his pursuit of survival. What struck me was that this was the fourth horror film I've seen in the last couple of months wherein a character gets his or her fingers cut off, and the even stranger thing is that 3 out of the 4 characters who end up with less digits by the end of the film, actually survive. In Hostel, House of Wax the main "survivors" end up with a few less pesky fingers than they had at the start of the film, same goes for The Hills. Sadly, the girl in Wolf Creek wasn't so lucky, she loses her fingers and shortly after, her life. Yet, the strange thing is Wolf Creek plays with our notion of who survives these type of films, and the woman who loses her fingers feels like the heroine of the film, she's the brave one who risks her own safety to save her friends, and her death is portrayed as a kind of "pulling the rug" underneath our collective expectations. Hell, even the upscale political thriller Syriana features a certain Best Supporting Actor who gained a lot of weight for his role getting a couple of fingernails yanked off. Hey Clooney, count your lucky stars you weren't in a horror movie, fingernails can grow back.
As for the film itself, let me first note that sadly I still haven't seen the original Wes Craven directed version. I will give props to director Alexandre Aja for creating sufficient levels of intensity throughout the film, I never felt safe and none of the characters are either. I have two complaints, like his first film High Tension, Aja frequently speeds the film up to move things along, supposedly for the "benefit" of our ADD idled minds, while he doesn't go as over the top as he did in Tension (of the worst offender of this cinematic type, Saw) I can't help but lose interest and am immediately taken out of the film. Aja attempt at making some sort of statement about America and its lust for violence comes after amateurish, most noticeably in a scene where one of the deformed Hill dwellers with eyes sings The Star Spangled Banner and later when said hill dweller is impaled with an American flag. Still as far as horror films go, this one has balls (or as Stephen Colbert would say "huevos grande").
grade: B-
