The Hills Have Eyes

Dir. Wes Craven

90 Minutes

1977

USA

Starring: Suze Lanier-Bramlett, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace, Russ Grieve, John Steadman, James Whitworth

***/*****

While Wes Craven's body of work rarely ignites any personal excitement, there is a mild interest in the work he produced before his eventual Elm Street shift (with Last House on the Left being a favorite from this period). Later films come across as a bit monotonous, with narratives that ride on the coattails of their ideas at the expense of interesting style (with films like theScreamfranchise exhibiting a certain charm that manages to overpower Craven's usually trappings, but a particularly bad time was had with People Under the Stairs).The Hills Have Eyes is kind of on the borderline of the gritty, sleazy tendencies ofLast Houseand the more polished, "clean" (a strange word considering the picture takes place entirely in the desert, has a group of inbred cannibals attacking a group of tourists, and features quite the bite of rape and slaughter) feel, that takes an exploitation concept but only barely to remain within the mainstream eye. 

As already touched upon, the narrative is extremely simple: a group of tourist on their way to California (on the hunt for "swimming pools and fancy cars) get into an accident with their trailer, swerve off the road (and that gas station attendant with the bloody handprint on his door warned them to stay on the road), and become terrorized by a group of desert cannibals who start to pick them off one by one. The film is fairly detached from its violence, with none of it really having much of an impact outside of its observation. The rape scene particularly leaves a bad taste because its inclusion (most likely to show the animalistic sexual nature of the desert beings) feels tacked on and leads to none of the potential for emotional weight as Last House (and Bergman's beautiful original The Virgin Spring) does. Here it is more a means to an end, an opportunity for the victims juvenile husband to "take charge" when the murders of his in-laws and kidnapping of his infant child would probably have been more than enough to chart the character change (and this is a detail left intact in the solid 2005 remake, but suffers from the exact same criticism). 

There are some notes of interest amidst the killings and screaming, mostly rooted in comparisons between civilization and animal cacophony (though there are whispers of a hierarchy for the cannibals, oddly more full-fledged in the awful sequel in 1984). Even the family is headed in the direction of elevated society as they wax poetic about the pools, cars, sunshine, and gin and tonics that await them in California, like some kind of warped GRAPES OF WRATH. There is a desire for glamour, perhaps inspired by the newborn baby, but they find nothing but dirt, grim, mutilation, and destruction. But there is also a sense of their place as outsiders, both the family headed for a "better life" but also for the son-in-law who is the only one that stands apart from the rest of the group. There is an intelligence to the piece, but there is already a sense that Craven is headed in a different direction from what is established (and perhaps promised) in his debut. But it remains an interesting work, and definitely a mode of the guy that is personally far more appealing than what would come.

October 20th, 2019