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The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Reviewed by Matt
Posted on March 8, 2006 
Filed Under Cannibals, Movies, Nasties, Slashers

Wes Craven’s second feature shares many thematic traits with his debut, Last House On The Left, even if on the surface they share little in common. Hills tells the story of the Carter family, travelling across the Californian desert in their Winnebago in search of an inherited silver mine. A road accident leaves them stranded in a nuclear testing site - and an easy target for the mutated, cannibalistic family that lives in the nearby hills. As the Carters are picked off one by one, the surviving family members realise they have to play the mutants at their own game, leading to a deadly cycle of attack and retribution…

Craven’s early efforts more often than not get tagged simply as exploitation movies, but although this label is not entirely unjustified, it does rather sell the appeal of these films short. The director happily mines many of the superficial themes of mid to late 70s grindhouse fare (cannibalism, mutilation, revenge etc.) but adds a thoughtfulness and a sense of grim inevitably that raises his early work almost to the level of a parable. Last House and Hills are hardly complex tragedies in the mould of Hamlet, but they do feature characters drawn into a downward spiral of violence and revenge that damages their souls as much as their flesh. Hills is full to the brim of shocking imagery - particularly the attack on Big Bob, the Carter patriarch - but the film’s horror lies in the ease with which the wholesome Carters are prepared to match and even outplay the mutants at their own game. That the film’s nominal ‘monsters’ are prepared to gut a dog is not wholly unexpected, but what are we to make of Bobby Carter’s gleeful use of his own mother’s corpse to lure the cannibals into a death trap? Craven’s point seems not to be that terrible things happen to good people, but that ‘good’ people are ready capable of the most terrible things.

Given that both families end up engaged in an equally-matched war of attrition, it’s appropriate that many parallels exist between the two. The cannibals are as much of an extended, rather disfunctional brood as the Carters are, and Craven draws on the obvious similarities between the mutant father Jupiter and Big Bob. As with many good guys in 70s horror films, the Carters are so winsomely Colgate-fresh that there’s a perverse satisfaction in seeing them picked off, but in all fairness Craven writes for them well - their banter has a natural bounce to it that renders them more or less likeable. The mutants’ dialogue unfortunately slides into monster-speak cliche fairly frequently, but then their appeal lies more in their bizarre rituals and looks - particularly eldest son Pluto, played by Michael Berryman (who made a respectable genre career out of his strange features).

The whole conflict is presented with the same unflinching directness that served Craven so well in Last House. There are some truly horrific images on display here, particularly Big Bob’s spectacularly horrible demise, but unlike other exploitation directors he never fetishises it. The near-documentary realism he employs, coupled with the dry, stark desert surroundings, means that the horrors on display are merely catalogued as the punishing end-product of the characters’ unravelling; by the time the Carters turn killers, the damage has already been done and the rising body-count is simply the payoff. The Hills Have Eyes is at times uneven and occasionally suffers from its low production values, but its message is loud, clear and pertinent. Like Last House, it balances the thrilling transgression of exploitation movies with a genuinely sobering outlook, and is definitely worth a look for those with a strong stomach.

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