The Hills Have Eyes

  When I started this blog my first review was on the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, a film that has a very special place in my heart. Now, one year later, I’m celebrating the anniversary of the blog by revisiting the original for the first time in ten years. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The Hills Have Eyes was written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream) and was released on July 22nd, 1977. The film was made on an estimated budget of between $350,000 and $700,000 and ultimately grossed $25 million. It received largely positive reviews upon release.

The Hills Have Eyes (like its remake twenty-nine years later) follows a family on a cross country roadtrip who run afoul of a family of cannibals in the hills of Nevada.

Having seen the remake before I ever saw the original, and forming an emotional attachment to it, it was inevitable that my initial viewing of The Hills Have Eyes would be colored through that lens. Indeed, when I finally watched it all those years ago my reaction was that it was just fine. Watching the film this time, I wanted to do my best to avoid comparing it to a film that wouldn’t exist for another three decades and appreciate it on its own terms. Once again though, I’m left feeling this film is just fine.

Craven’s direction is characteristically great, though a little unpolished here in his second major feature. The script is fine, but the Carter family is woefully underdeveloped. We barely get a sense of their personalities and dynamics before half of them are killed in the trailer attack set piece. The cannibal family is afforded slightly more development, but it doesn’t move far beyond “hill-billy” stereotypes (with a strange caveman aesthetic).

The pacing suffers in the back half of the film as well. The trailer attack is great here (though, like in the remake, I could do without Brenda’s (Susan Lanier, Days of Our Lives) rape), but Doug’s (Martin Speer, Big Man on Campus) search for his infant daughter falls flat due to a bland setting, poor action, and a lack of real stakes. Brenda and Bobby’s (Robert Houston, Shogun Assassin) trap back at the trailer fares far better and I appreciate that Brenda is given a lot of agency in this sequence and takes the lead.

The Hills Have Eyes is a well-made film, but I struggle to connect with it past appreciating its technical merits. The remake offers better gore, music, and sympathetic characters and generally improves upon the original in every way.

Rating: 3 derelict gas stations out of 5

Other Observations:

• Does the Dog Die? RIP Beauty

• Harrison’s Favorite Scare: Once again, the trailer massacre is amazing.

• While comparisons to the remake are unfair if inevitable, a far fairer comparison would be to its contemporary The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which I believe to be a more successful tackling of a similar story.

Next Week: We’re traveling back in time and to Japan to check out Onibaba!