The Hills Have Eyes

Wes Craven’s answer to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But a class weaker. Its desert setting may be equally unsettling and the strange synth music gives it a proper veneer of creepiness, but the family of cannibals are just a bunch of shabby buffoons and don’t embody Chainsaw’s cautionary and relatively believable naturalism. We see them carelessly during the day, at night and in situations when they’re just ridiculous self-parodies. The scenes around their hovel and their mother wearing an Indian headdress are reminiscent of Winnetou. That said, the first third of the film is pretty bad-ass in terms of its atmosphere and cruelty! (10/04/2003)

A Nevada masquerade with retarded robbers. I’m not sure if they’re funnier, or if it's the multitude of interpretations that subsequently emerged. I’m opening the box labeled: “A horror cult film that completely passed me by” and placing it next to Carpenter’s Halloween. (03/29/2023)

Aja’s remake is so good, that (given its the average rating) I ignored Craven’s original for a pretty long time. Which was a mistake, it’s a surprisingly good horror flick. If there’s something that elevates it above the remake are the redneck cannibals, here they differ both in appearance and character, so they are proper characters instead just murder machines, as in the modern version. And they look so prehistorical, like Neanderthals, I loved it. For one hour, the film is basically excellent – atmospheric, brutal, terrifying. It’s a pity then that the third act slides into a relatively boring massacre, and in daylight to boot. So the final impression is a bit lower, but overall, almost unexpected satisfaction. (12/03/2014)

Five years passed between the release of Wes Craven’s directorial debut, the still disturbing The Last House on the Left, and his second film. As with that earlier film, he not only directed The Hills Have Eyes, but also wrote the screenplay and did the editing himself. The plot couldn’t be any simpler: the American middle class is confronted in the middle of the desert with something whose existence is not acknowledged in the safety of the home. A family of Republicans (their political leanings are apparent from their warm relationship with guns and hypocritical faith in God) is about to become intimately familiar with a family of degenerate cannibals. The film is notably less intense and disturbing than the thematically similar The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What I miss is especially the dinginess of Hooper’s cult hixploitation flick; in the best case, even the cannibals here look like a gang of bandits from a television fairy-tale for kids. They don’t arouse fear and we don’t see much of the violence that they carry out. Because there is nothing to be afraid of, The Hills Have Eyes works better as “mirror held up to society” than as a horror film eliciting a feeling of dread. It is worth noting that Craven didn’t employ the usual division between technological and pre-technological societies, as the savages also use modern technology; they have simply learned to control the achievements of civilisation, regardless of how uncivilised they are themselves. Furthermore, in their use of technology, they achieve better results than the protagonists, who are repeatedly let down by otherwise reliable gadgets, mostly at the moment when they want to kill someone with them. They manage to get the killing done only by using more barbaric means (an axe, a dagger) requiring hand-to-hand combat. In other words, if you want to survive in the wilderness, you have to become a savage yourself. This psychologically dense (the loss of the father, the mother’s fear of snakes, Pluto’s frustration from being denied sex) film ends at the moment the monster inside of us is revealed, at the moment of the direct attack on the camera. There is no epilogue that would restore the status quo. Deal with it the best you can, dear viewer. Deprived of a sense of security like the whole family in the film, we are the main victim. Very unsettling, very Craven. 65% (09/20/2012)

If Craven had done one thing better and set the communicativeness solely on the level of the victims, this could have been one of the best horror films of the 1970s. This way, what remains is an experience of a hopelessness and assorted murders, but degraded by the frequent depiction of a ridiculous cannibal family and their demented dialogue. Fortunately, at least Alexander Aja's remake successfully eliminated almost all the shortcomings. (04/06/2018)