Moviemakers these days like to consider themselves jacks of all trades, able to float from genre to genre as easily as George Bush chooses who controls American container ports. However, the results can often be mixed. Francis Ford Coppola’s last effort, “Jack,” in which Robin Williams played a boy who has the physical body of a 40-year-old funnyman, wasn’t quite as good as the first two Godfather movies. In fact, it made Godfather III look like Godfather II.

Similarly, Martin Scorsese is never as good as he is unless he’s doing what he does best (i.e., making a violent movie about Italian Americans). “The Aviator” was good, though I kept wishing he’d cast Joe Pesci instead of Leonardo Di Caprio, and that there were more shoot-outs and more Rolling Stones in the soundtrack, and perhaps he could have made Howard Hughes a drug dealing wise guy from Brooklyn.

However, there is one director who proudly sticks to his guns, a “genre director” in the traditional mold. Wes Craven remains faithful to the horror genre that made him famous. Indeed, he even breathed new life into this genre, one of Hollywood’s oldest, not once, but twice: first with everyone’s favorite wise-cracking, teenage slasher Freddy Kruger in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and then with “Scream,” a film that surprised everybody by killing its star, Drew Barrymore, in the first reel and by briefly giving Courtney Cox the illusion that there could be life outside of “Friends.”

Though results are sometimes mixed, Craven is capable of making you put your hands over your eyes at least once a movie (though when watching the recent slew of bad horror movies churned out by Hollywood, I found myself quite happy to do this through the whole film).

“The Hill Have Eyes,” a remake of his 1977 movie of the same name, sees Craven relinquishing director duties to Frenchman Alexander Aja. Craven, meanwhile, produces. This makes for an interesting combination.

Like the original, the movie begins with an All American Family, including high-tech liberal son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford) and former hippie mom Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) on vacation in the deserts of New Mexico. After dad (Ted Levine) takes a shortcut through former nuclear testing grounds, the movie relishes the old stuck-in-the-middle-of-nowhere scenario as mutated cannibal zombie folk chase the family around the desert. These aren’t any old zombies, though. They are zombies with a political message: nukes are bad and they hurt people.

True to its predecessor and some of Craven’s other work, the remake charges up the fear factor with low-budget realism. Indeed, the remake strips movie-making down to its bare essentials and has fun with the limitations of the genre, achingly building suspense, nudging bums to the edges of seats. There is more suspense and gore than the three “Scream” movies put together, and Aja handles the action with panache. And—without giving too much away—he and co-screenwriter Grégory Levasseur flip horror convention midway through turning some of the victims into the aggressors. All in all this is quite a ride. With its Cold War themes of A-bombs and government secrecy and its B-movie aesthetics, “The Hills Have Eyes” is a horror flick that thrives on the entertainment value of its genre. Explosive stuff.