Directed by: Wes Craven
Premise: In Wes Craven’s original film, a
suburban family on its way to California gets stuck in the middle of the desert
on a deserted back road. The suburban family soon finds that they are being
preyed upon by a family of savages living in the surrounding hills.
What Works: As a piece of cinema, The Hills Have
Eyes is a great piece of entertainment that is engaging as a horror film and
as a survival film. It is tightly directed by Craven, savage in its violence but
also smart in its direction. The film is frightening with plenty of jump scares
and an ongoing sense of tension that increases as the film goes on. Despite the
far out premise of the story, the film is able to sell it with solid
performances all around, but especially by James Whitworth as Papa Jupiter and
John Steadman as Grandpa Fred, who gives a speech about the origin of the hills
family that rivals Robert Shaw’s Indianapolis speech in Jaws for creepiness and intensity. The original Hills Have Eyes is a great
survival story that mixes contemporary storytelling sensibilities with classic
frontier myths. The attacks by the savages on the family’s motor home mirror
the tradition of stories about Indians attacking White settlers. What Hills does remarkably is to make the film a commentary on these kinds of stories and
explore the implications of what it takes to survive and conquer the west.
Unlike the 2006
remake, the original Hills Have Eyes explores the family dynamics of
the suburban family and the feral family. The result is more frightening because
both sides are drawn well and this works towards a climax that undermines a good
versus evil binary. In this film, conquering savagery requires that the
civilized people become as violent as their attackers, a point punctuated in the
climax, and blurs the moral line between the civilized and the savage. In the
context of the film’s original release, just after the end of the Vietnam War,
the Manson Family murders, and in the wake of the cultural revolution of the
1960s and 70s, The Hills Have Eyes is a look into a culture that was
fighting itself and discovering that its sense of moral righteousness was more
rickety than it realized. Watching the film today, in the context of the Iraq
War, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Columbine massacre, and other events,
the film still has social relevance.
What Doesn’t: Some may laugh at the MacGyver-like ending of the film. It is a theme repeated in Craven’s early work like Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street and this plays into the frontier myths of ingenuity and resourcefulness. In the end, however, cleverness ultimately gives way to barbaric hand-to-hand combat.
DVD extras: Anchor Bay has put together an
impressive 2-disc DVD set that includes a documentary on the making of the film,
commentary tracks, an episode of The
Directors spotlighting Wes Craven’s career, as well as trailers and an
alternate ending. The film has been cleaned up considerably, as proved by a
restoration demo. The DVD features the original uncut edition of the film.
Bottom Line: The Hills Have Eyes was only
Craven’s second directorial feature, but it remains one of his best. Like
Romero’s original Night
of the Living Dead, The Hills Have Eyes is a critique of a
civilization at war with its own savage heart.