The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Plot Outline: A family travelling through California take the wrong turn in the desert and end up crashing their car and trailer. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, they have to deal with a family of cannibal hicks who have lived in the hills and want the family for lunch.

The Review: Wes Craven's second feature film is yet another addition to the "backwoods horror" cycle of the 70s in which it wasn't a good idea to venture off the main road because you always run into crazy people. Again Craven uses more or less the same plot as he did with The Last House on the Left in which a group of innocent people are preyed upon and then turn the tables on their tormentors by becoming as savage and barbaric. It works again for the most because the cannibal family are simply put across as purely sadistic and crazy and there is no way we can root for them at all. Craven keeps them in the shadows and confined to the background for a good half of the film and focuses on the family so that we care for them when they do eventually meet their ends. He does a pretty good job too because apart from one of the male characters, they're all really sympathetic (even the dad who meets a gruesome demise). But once the cannibal family begin to move in for the kill, instead of the film picking up the pace a little, it doesn't and instead trails off pretty quickly to leave us with a series of violent deaths and people chasing each other around in the dark and in the mountains. It may have been shocking back in the time but nowadays most of the violence looks pretty timid and the shock-value has been dramatically reduced. The death of "Big Bob" is particularly nasty and had me grimacing at the camera but apart from that, there's nothing we haven't seen in lower rated films since. The cast aren't particularly great but there's a really memorable turn from Michael Berryman as one of the cannibals - the guy is bald and I'm sorry to say, he looks like a complete weirdo. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life but he creeped me out like no one has done before with his weird looks.

Final Verdict: The Hills Have Eyes is clearly Craven's attempt to continue to direct shock horror films but having seen The Last House on the Left go too far with the shock value, he's toned things down a little too far and for the worst. It takes too long to go where it wants to go and when we get there, there's nothing at all for us to see. Disappointing.

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