The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Directed by Wes Craven
Taking an ill-advised detour en-route to California, the Carter family soon run into trouble when their RV breaks down in the middle of the desert. Stranded, they find themselves at the mercy of monstrous cannibals lurking in the surrounding hills.
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What critics compared The Hills Have Eyes to
About halfway through Alexandre Aja's remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, I was convinced that the film's tag line, "The lucky ones die first," must be referring to the viewers of this entrails-festooned entry in the Inbred Hillbilly Cannibal sub-sub-genre.
My money is on the 70's, which saw the release of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original The Hills Have Eyes, and of course John Boorman's Deliverance.
Catching the current wave of slick, Hollywood remakes of 1970s B-horror hits, Alexandre Aja has updated Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes," adding a few contemporary twists and pumping up the gore factor.
With his cowled eyes and pallid skin, young Noah Wiseman combines the plucky spark of Phantasm ’s Michael Baldwin with the haunted gaze of The Hills Have Eyes ’ Michael Berryman – a figure of both pity and fear who inspires wildly contradictory impulses in his tormented mother.
The touchstones of The Ritual point toward the direction of the story: Hints of “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977) and, more recently, “Bone Tomahawk” — although Bruckner’s film lacks the nightmarish rawness of the former and the cinematic poise and poetic brutality of the latter.
Bone Tomahawk is The Searchers mashed up with Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, for sure, but no one can accuse Zahler, who also scripted, of not stealing from the best.
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Bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to Craven’s 1977 shocker, “The Hills Have Eyes” (which spawned a marvelous 2006 remake from Alexandre Aja), the creators of “Chernobyl Diaries” have a lot of explaining to do.
…out of The Hills Have Eyes (July 20/02) Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
Having genre veteran Wes Craven, who had added indelibly to the genre in both the 1970s (1972’s Last House on the Left, 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes) and’80s (specifically 1984’s Nightmare on Elm Street and its legion of sequels), helm the film was a small stroke of genius, marrying the old and the new for a postmodern spin that gratified audiences by respecting their knowledge of the genre while still producing genuine scares and even (horror of horrors!) sympathetic characters and a sense of mystery and intrigue.
Since then, Wes Craven has gone on to more auspicious projects, including The Hills Have Eyes as well as the first and last movies in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, an uncommonly imaginative knock-off from the slasher boom of the late 70s and early 80s.
…out of The Hills Have Eyes (July 20/02) Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
This may be truer today than ever, considering Craven's meteoric rise to mainstream respectability after the staggering box office success of his Scream trilogy (1996, 1997, 2000), for which he was 'rewarded' with the opportunity to direct a Miramax melodrama (Music of the Heart, 1999).
Not even director Wes Craven's later, teen-filled "Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Scream" movies strike a nerve like this.
While still a relatively obscure filmmaker in 1984, his almost gleeful awareness of horror movie formulas allowed him to turn their cliché-ridden principles upside down right from the beginning, as witnessed by endeavors like “Last House on the Left” (a brilliant film) and “The Hills Have Eyes” (a lesser example).
Two of his previous outings, 1978's The Hills Have Eyes and 1982's campy comic book adaptation, Swamp Thing, had developed cult followings, but Craven was far from a mainstream director.
After The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, two monumentally unpleasant horror films that prey upon the social anxieties of the 1970s, Craven took up the mantle (and the playbook) of John Carpenter and Sean Cunningham.
After making such cult horror classics as 1972's Last House on the Left and 1977's The Hills Have Eyes, then turning his hand to comic-book movies with the unsatisfactorily cheapo Swamp Thing (1982), Wes Craven hit the big time with this seminal schlocker.
Long before Wes Craven made Scream or even A Nightmare on Elm Street (and especially Music of the Heart), he made The Hills Have Eyes - a sporadically effective Texas Chain Saw Massacre ripoff.
Sandwiched between his notorious saga of rape, revenge, and realist horror, Last House on the Left (1972), and his franchise-initiating fairytale of supernatural serial killing, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes tends to get lost in critical discussion of America's reigning horror auteur.