THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977) Mmmmm...baby! I'd seen The Hills Have Eyes before, but it was years ago, on a VHS tape in such rough shape there was a big horizontal band of distortion running through just about the entire movie. Not too tough to imagine how fondly I forgot the movie over the next years. After years of consistent praise (if, often, qualified by "before he made Scream"-type comments), I decided to finally check it out again, this time on a somewhat more reliable format. It's early, early Wes Craven, and doesn't much resemble his later films. It has the skid-row grit of The Last House On The Left, but unlike that movie, at least this one can maintain a consistent tone without continually derailing it. A vacationing tri-generational family is towing a trailer on their way to "movie stars and fancy cars" in L.A., and along the way decides to head deep into the southwest desert nuclear testing grounds to inspect an inherited silver mine, against the dire warnings of crotchety hillbilly John Steadman (it just wouldn't be the same without dire warnings from a crotchety hillbilly). Another family who literally lives in a cave preys on them when their vehicle breaks down, and it's family against family. 70's hillbilly horror set in the desert, basically. Unlike the Texas Chainsaw Massacre clan, this family lives in desperate poverty (we first see one of the members trying to trade some stolen goods for food) and their motives are a little more understandable than Leatherface's. The "good" family's numbers whittle down fast once they start to drop, mostly centering on the younger men, married-in Martin Speer (who looks like a cross between Sonny Bono and Ron Jeremy, and is the kind of guy who has to touch broken glass to confirm that it's sharp) and closeted gymnast Robert Houston. Most familiar is Dee Wallace as new mother, though I think I recognized Virginia Vincent as the elderly grandma who puts her faith in the good Lord (BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHA - so dead). This family doesn't start out as helplessly as one might think; they have a gun, lots of bullets, and two snarly, growly dogs Vincent unconvincingly says "just want to play". Of course, to boil them down to a "good" family and an "evil" family is more than a little simplistic - they're more like a soft city family and a very, very, very hard country family, both of which will do whatever it takes to survive. Problem is, the city family only has to survive this movie; the country family has had to survive like this for many years ("Long enough for a devil boy to become a devil man!") without hope of anything better. The hillbilly family is really nuts, clan leader Jupiter (James Whitworth) sporting a massive scar down the middle of his face and giving an angry lecture to a severed head, matriarch (Cordy Clark) ordering the execution of babies, cavegirl daughter (Janus Blythe) using rattlesnakes as weapons, and of course the inestimable Michael Barryman, whose face appears prominently on most of the poster art. He doesn't turn up until about halfway through the movie, but as always makes a strong impression. Craven doesn't much take advantage of the nighttime shoots; darkness is of course a fundamental part of most horror movies, and in a movie that aims to frighten it's not hard to make it work, but somehow he doesn't. There's little sense of the blind isolation and omnidirectional dread that you'd think would accompany being stuck in a vast, open, flat area in nearly total darkness. The two climaxes both take place in the day, and while they're both kinetic and violent, neither one is very intense, one of them depending on one or two too many clever Macgyverisms, the other depending on a dumbass setting his knife down (why?) in the worst possible place. I was bored, bored, bored when I first saw this movie years ago, and after seeing it again now I can't entirely attribute that to the shitty tape. The "civilized family descends into the barbarism of their opponents" theme is hard to buy, as it usually is in these movies - they may end up doing awful things in self-defense but they never end up doing gratuitously awful things like their opponents do (i.e. if the hillbillies had a baby, they wouldn't try to eat it). But it has more than a few moments of visceral power (Mars and Pluto's attack on the women in the trailer in particular) and it's fun to watch two so different families at war like this. BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE