Before Scream, before A Nightmare On Elm Street…hell, long
before he went legit with Redeye…Wes Craven directed the Hills Have Eyes. In the
1970s, the Carter family (no, not the then-president and his clan, but a
different Carter family altogether), on their way to California from Cleveland
Ohio, decide to stop off in a desolate stretch of the desert to take a look at
an old silver mine. The old coot who runs the "last chance" store on the main
road pleads with them to just forget about taking their little side trip and
keep moving onwards to California. It seems there’s something really nasty out
in the surrounding hills that these gentle city folk really wouldn’t want to
meet. But the Carter family, out to prove that--for the most part--horror movie
heroes are the biggest bunch of twits around, decide that they will go visit
that desolate silver mine after all, gosh darn it!
Papa Bob Carter drives the family’s station wagon and trailer home down a lonely
dirt road, where everybody gets spooked by low-flying fighter jets--the area is
an Air Force bombing range; something which the old coot also warned them
about--and big daddy Carter crashes the car, totaling it. With night fast
approaching, everybody in the family promptly splits up, giving the murderous
hill people who are stalking them plenty of opportunity to pick them off one by
one. The only member of this low-I.Q. family (and I mean the Carters, not the
hill people) that has any brains is a German Shepard named Beast. Beast is one
cool dog who cuts right to the chase, literally going after several members of
the hill people with a vengeance.
The Hills Have Eyes, the corn has ears, and yet I had very little patience for
this flick. Some thirty years after its original release, The Hills Have Eyes
really doesn’t hold up very well. Craven’s film, which was once considered to be
at the extreme edge of horror, has long since been eclipsed in that department
by more recent (although not necessarily better) horror films. And once stripped
of its shock value, what remains isn’t much: the hill family--who are supposed
to be a bunch of cannibalistic mutants--are really about as scary as a pack of
frisky gerbils. If it weren’t for the stupidity of their victims, who wander
into this godforsaken wasteland for no good reason, they would have starved to
death a long time ago. The one saving grace of the film is the entire
retribution angle that Craven plays out in the story’s second half, as members
of the gentle Carter family each discover their murderous inner child and open a
can of whoop-ass on those pesky cannibals. The DVD comes equipped with a
commentary track featuring Craven and producer Peter Locke, and little else by
way of special features. Fans of Wes Craven’s later films will no doubt want to
check out the Hills Have Eyes (which was only his second film as a director),
but if you’re just a casual fan of horror movies, you might want to skip this
film and check out the remake instead.
--SF