Hills Have Eyes (Original)
Horror movies had kind of gone into a bit of a rut in the early 70s, as they were trying way too hard to be more fantastical exercises with vampires and others of their ilk camping and hamming it up in order to turn the genre into little more than just fun, silly, “good time” flicks with audiences everywhere shrieking with pretend fear rather than actual dread. When Wes Craven came on the scene, he happened to notice this very trend and armed with low budgets and loyal casts and crews, set out to literally make horror horrifying again, starting with The Last House On The Left, a downbeat, dire piece with not even a bit of a sense of fun about it depicting two girls being brutally raped and murdered before their family does the same to the monsters responsible. An effective film with some stumbling points when it came to tone and writing, it opened the door for Craven to go on to this 1977 follow up, which was admitted by Craven to be a direct homage to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (itself a major game changer for the genre), with the extra touches coming from both the inner family dynamics on both sides as well as the willingness being shown by the civilized family to combat such savagery with brutal, violent tactics of their own. In some ways, Craven was making statements all at once about class warfare, the choices that can still be made by people in their lives despite a less than fortunate background, and the rag tag anything goes style of combat as seen in places like Vietnam. The film begins with a so called “normal” family heading out to a remote part of the California desert to (rather stupidly) seek out an old silver mine somewhere out there that one of them had supposedly inherited. The patriarch father (a retired cop) is one of those familiar seeming types with a casual racist attitude and built in tolerance for his own family’s foibles. He is joined by his wife (one of those women who are completely dependent on their husband for emotional support), his All-American teenage son (played by future Oscar winning gay short films director Robert Houston), his extremely gorgeous blonde airhead teen daughter (Susan Lanier), his eldest married daughter (future 80s movie icon Dee Wallace) touting her newborn baby, his capable son in law (Martin Speer), and the two family dogs named appropriately enough, Beauty and Beast. Unfortunately for them, they have apparently “trespassed” not only into an Air Force restricted zone where nuclear testing had once been done, but also onto the stomping grounds of a deranged, mutanted, cannibalistic family who happen to be total scavengers as well, seeing the seemingly well off family (who have a trailer hitch full of supplies) and are looking to move in and take what they have by force, and thus we have the classic class warfare metaphor of the “haves” being under siege by the “have nots” who feel fully entitled to take from them what’s theirs undeservedly (a virtual remake could very well be called White Family Breaks Down In The Ghetto). They start by singling out the father, who has gone off alone in search of help only to come to the gas station they had stopped at in the opening scene, where he learns the truth from the old codger who runs it (who is also incredibly the grandfather to the whole clan) only for the father to see him get taken to his death for telling on them, and then they take advantage of the dad’s bad heart to grab him, literally crucify him, and then set him on fire practically in front of his entire family, actually burning him alive. As the mother immediately disintegrates mentally from the sight, the remaining males go in search of those responsible, while two of the family members (in an admittedly cowardly move) completely ambush the females who are still holding it down in the trailer, raping one of them while killing the other two before kidnapping the baby to use as a midnight snack. This turns out to be a bad mistake on their part psychologically, as when the brother and the son in law return to see the aftermath of the carnage, it is only then that they are finally mentally prepared to use any means necessary to wipe out this band of psychos once and for all (even if the family dog is the one with the highest body count). The best scenes in the movie are the scenes showing the mutant family interacting amongst themselves, as we are witness to their own so called family values as it were, somehow managing to humanize them while still depicting just how truly inhuman they really are, led by Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, an actor who made a strong impression here before literally disappearing from acting altogether with his actual whereabouts being unknown for decades until his family came forward years after he had passed away to confirm that he had actually died from lung cancer in 1991), along with his nasty, obese wife / mother to his kids (said to be an ex-hooker), the near retarded, headdress wearing Mercury (hilariously played by Executive Producer Peter Locke, doing his part to keep the budget down), the hulking, monstrous, fright wig wearing Mars (Lance Gordon), and best of all, the creepily authentic looking Pluto as played by the now legendary horror icon Michael Berryman, a guy whose actual deformed visage was caused by a rare disease which, compared to the rest of the cast whose “look” was mostly created by using makeup FX, resulted in him becoming the unforgettable face of the film itself (and the sequel) which won him a spot on all the posters and in the hearts of horror movie fans everywhere with him being said to actually be one of the more personable guys on the convention circuit and who continued to parlay his unique look into a series of further horror movie roles as well (along with a hysterical cameo in Weird Science). But the real heart and soul of the family (and maybe the film) is the youngest daughter in the mutant family named Ruby (Janus Blythe), an extremely dirty but still very pretty teenage girl who somehow still has a sense of decency and knows the difference between right and wrong, and has been chained up at the ankle and slapped around by her parents and siblings her whole life for being that way, but despite fully knowing that these depraved animals are her “family”, early on in the movie we learn of her desire to be accepted as “normal” and is ironically the only one of these cave dwellers who actually longs for a better life, which makes her actions late in the film especially crucial. Of course, after the initial attacks, it’s now all out war between the “normals” and the “mutants” and Craven does well to depict the carnage therein, even as he misses a few choice opportunities along the way. But the important thing is in how these “good people”, when fully motivated to kill and take lives after the horrifying deaths of their own loved ones, do just that with both a fire in their eyes and a terrifying savagery of their own that would make even the most depraved monsters wince, making one wonder not only if they’ll ever be the same, but also if they themselves will ever be able to fit back into society ever again. And with the raw, visceral feel that Craven brings to the proceedings with a rapid pace and realistic depiction of violence (save for the heroic antics of the dog who seems to have super powers), this became one of THE definitive horror classics of the 70s that continued to have a profound influence well beyond that decade, spawning a direct 1984 sequel (also directed by Craven) that went the way of overdoing it on flashback footage from the first film, and later to see a remake that eschewed atmosphere in favor of gore, even as one need only to look back at the original film here in order to prove that the classics never die…
9/10