The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

The Hills Have Eyes is the late Wes Craven's third film (right behind something I've never heard of called The Fireworks Woman) from his masterful, groundbreaking first film, The Last House on the Left (1972), a film with social commentary and subtext a mile long, but one generally derided or even hated as being a misogynistic and sickening mess. (It's a whole helluva lot better and deeper than that, I can assure you, and I've got a whole essay about that you can read here: "The Castle and Krug".) Craven's most famous film is, of course, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and its resultant sequels and spin-offs and remakes, etc. He was a horror legend in Hollywood, and his brand was sterling when he tragically passed on.

This is why this film, which undoubtedly has its charms, not to mention the fact that it essentially does what it is supposed to do (titillate, disgust, even sicken), seems a little hackneyed, a little disappointing. The setting is a vast desert test range, nuclear, and the plot is borrowed from the legend of Sawney Beane (the Scottish cannibal clan we just wrote about in a more serious article). It involves "Big Bob" (Russ Grieve) a bitter Cleveland cop with a heart condition, and his trip with his family across the desert. They're riding in a station wagon with a trailer in the back, and his oldest daughter (Dee Wallace) and her husband (Martin Speer) along with their looney religious mother (Virginia Vincent) and two younger siblings (Susan Lanier and Robert Houston) are "Big Bob's" hostages to fortune apparently. Along the way, they meet the one indispensable character in such a movie, the Crazy Old Coot Who Knows Too Much. In the best tradition of ALL of these movies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the Thirteenth, and Children of the Corn, to name but a few, the COCWKTM acts as the "Guardian at the Gate" to warn the hero (in these films, victim), of the dangers that lie ahead. It's in the tradition of fairy tales and myth cycles (and I know this stuff having gotten three credits for it at university, all those years ago).

In this film, the Old Coot (played by John Steadman) apparently gave birth to a monstrous mutant human, most likely brought about by the close proximity with which he and his doomed wife were living to the desert test range. Big Bob finds this out after he and his weird little family (the daughter's husband has a vaguely Sonny Bono look about him) crash their vehicle, and he goes, in the best and smartest possible way, walking back across the desert to the ramshackle filling station operated by the Old Coot ("Fred"). Big Bob of course, as mentioned before, is a man with a heart condition. That is going to walk through the desert. Many miles. Brilliant.

A family of inbreds born from the loathsome loins of Fred's murderous son lurks in the desert hills, watching, waiting. One of them is an obese woman played by Cordy Clark, (how she got that way living in a cave in the desert one wonders) dressed in a vaguely Native American outfit that is somewhat insulting. She has a feral daughter, Ruby (Janus Blythe) who wants to escape and join "civilization" (such as it is. She has three feral sons, all mutant and mental and all killers, dressed in the same combination of Mad Max meets Tonto. (Which, on the whole, is pretty much par for the course with these old grade b action horror thrillers.)

It's not long before the fun begins. The feral killers kill Fred, kidnap Big Bob, blow him up with gasoline, kill one of the family dogs, prowl the night, and then enter the family trailer and wreak havoc. They kidnap the baby (almost forgot to mention Dee Wallace's baby!) and debate on whether or not to kill it or raise it as their own. After all, "Baby is good meat! Fat and juicey!" (Sam Raimi once wryly commented that this scene had the viewer mostly pleading to "Kill the baby! Please! Don't raise it as one of your own!")

Meanwhile, the family, what's left of them, fight back pretty valiantly. The blonde son (Robert Houston) wields one of Dad's guns, and, Dee Wallace's husband (Martin Speer) gets in on the act, and the film gets down to the nitty-gritty of two warring camps locked in a kind of guerrilla or even siege warfare, a struggle for survival. Craven, who had an obsession with portraying boobytraps and home defense in his films, (starting with Last House and going straight through to A Nightmare on Elm Street), does not disappoint here, and we see Big Bob's young blonde, good-looking Middle-Class kid lay booby traps to kill of Pluto (Michael Berryman), Mars (Lance Gordon), Mercury (Arthur King), and Papa Jupe ("Jupiter", James Whitworth). Why they are each named after a different planet is a mystery. (Actor Michael Berryman, incidentally, suffers from acromegaly and has often been chosen for film roles such as these, in the tradition of actor Rondo Hatton, who also had the same disfigurement.)

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The film is quick, brutal, grim, and gruesome. The corpse of the mother is propped in a chair at one point, very, ahem, "lifelike" if you'll forgive the expression. There is blood (a little too red) and brutality, and a building feeling of suspense as the nice all-American family find themselves ensnared by wild, cretinous nuclear desert mutants who eat little babies and kill everything in sight. The family dog (the other is killed) helps out in the best tradition of heartwarming animal stories, fighting the cannibal clan as well, killing one of them.

But the film ultimately fails to convince. It is because of the cannibal hill dwellers themselves. They all have seemingly perfect teeth. Their costumes look like what they are: costumes. They are a little too well-fed (filet of toddler notwithstanding), and none of them strike you as truly degenerate maniacs. They strike you as being ACTORS playing degenerate maniacs. Not the genuine article.

Regardless of the quibble, it's a fun ride for an hour and a half. And if you just want to see a bad movie, well, be my guest. Just don't throw out the baby with the soup, bathwater, or nuclear waste. Because you know, "Fat and juicy!" Harhar.

The Hills Have Eyes - Wes Craven (1977) [Full Movie HD]