‘THE Hills” are alive with the sound of mutants. These man-eaters are deadly, mainly in their ability to bore you to death.

When the government conducted all those nuclear tests in the Southwestern desert in the 1950s, it couldn’t have calculated such awful side effects as the “The Hills Have Eyes.” What the hills don’t have is suspense, because this remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror flick maps itself out in advance.

You don’t want your audience to get ahead of you, ever, but we learn in the opening minutes that a bunch of mutant freaks spawned by nuclear testing in New Mexico enjoy killing whatever crosses their path.

Enter a squabbling family towing a Gulf Stream trailer: Obviously they’ll be our victims for the evening, though Kathleen Quinlan, who plays the mother, should have known better than to drive through the West again after “Breakdown.” Since we know what’s going to happen, why does it take 45 minutes for the mutants to get to work? In the meantime, we have to wait for the screenwriters to struggle with Character Development 101 (big daddy is a gun nut, his bearded son-in-law a liberal pantywaist; the other family members don’t even get personalities).

The running time is heavily padded with wheezy horror-flick tricks that couldn’t possibly scare even a 16-year-old girl anymore. The camera creeps around stalking the family from a distance to suggest the baddies’ point of view. There are barely audible whispers, dull false alarms: Eek, someone’s at the window! Oh, it’s only the little brother.

When the mutants do come a-killing, they have the advantages of heavy weaponry, surprise and superior numbers. They could easily wipe out the whole family in one scene. Instead, they let some get away, place others in easily escapable situations, pause long enough for others to pick up a weapon or get help. Cannibalism I can understand, but hey, mutants: You’re lazy.

Rather than campy fun, the situations are just stupid. A person whose torso has a hole in it the size of Albuquerque continues to chat for a while before fading away with a peacefulness not ordinarily associated with sucking chest wounds. Another victim, who has just had several fingertips removed with an ax, barely cries “ouch.”

There aren’t any twists or hidden secrets, except what exactly the mutants look like. When we finally see them, one is so dentally frightening he looks worse than a radiation-warped monster. He actually looks . . . British. Another appears to have graduated from the Jabba the Hutt School of Beauty.

It’s pretty dull to watch people killing each other for an hour and a half, no matter how bloody the pickax work gets. That’s why better filmmakers enliven this kind of thing with witty dialogue or allegory. “The Hills Have Eyes” has half-thought references to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Straw Dogs” and some half-cooked symbolism (someone’s neck gets an American flag planted in it), but its only point is to get us wondering who will live and who won’t. Unanswered is the question: Who cares?

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THE HILLS HAVE EYES

[*] (One star)

Radioactive waste.

Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (gory violence, profanity, rape, cannibalism). At the Empire, the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, others.