After
Night of the Living Dead began to make big money,
many low-budget filmmakers tried a
similar approach. Small cast, few special effects
or none, and a tight story. But most are bad rip-offs of
Night, or of another movie about that time,
Deliverance.
Deliverance asked disturbing
questions. Basically this: You and your middle-class
friends/ family are alone in the wilderness when you run into
a savage clan of strangers doing their best to kill you.
You’re too far away to get help from
anyone. How much violence will you take on to stay
alive?
This movie is one of the exceptions among those
inspired by Deliverance and Night. One of the real good ones. (Another is
the hard-to-find Canadian movie Rituals starring
Hal Holbrook.)
The Hills wastes no time
getting started. The Carter’s, the typical American
middle-class family in The Hills Have Eyes
must make these life and death decisions—real fast.
An accident has left them stranded in the middle of
the desert; too far away to get help on their
CB radio. The family seems in danger from the
beginning—the rocks and mountains look bleak
and threatening. You can believe that
anything could live up there. Stuck on this dirt
road (after swerving to avoid a rabbit) the Carter family
seems to be exposed and vulnerable. Not a place where you
want to be stuck for the night.
Little do they know that a cannibalistic family is
about to close in on them. This family, with names
like Jupiter, Pluto, Mars, and Mercury, actually kills and
eats one of the Carters’ dogs (named Beauty) and captures
their one grandchild for their next meal. 
Pluto (Michael Berryman)
In a night and day, the Carters’ will lose three family members to
the cannibal clan. Now it is their turn to
fight…and they’re soon prepared and ready. Just one example;
Doug tells the surviving dog, Beast, do your job–
kill these people. And the Beast is ready to give
it his best shot.
But it’s not only The Beast who is forced into
action. The two youngest Carter family members,
Bobby and Brenda must use their wits to survive. Not
only that, they are forced to kill at close range with an axe
after their booby trap fails to complete the job.
Was Wes Craven trying to do more than to create a low
budget action/horror movie? Without question, the movie
works real well on that basic level. You just watch
and enjoy it for its plot and characters. I don’t know
if he had something more to say, on a symbolic level, or if he
was just looking to create a gripping story.
Critics have suggested the idea that the
families reflect or mirror each other. Each does have
a father, mother and four “children.” (The Carter’s
have two daughters, a son, plus a son in law; the cannibals
have three sons, Mars, Pluto, Mercury, and a daughter, Ruby.)
Ruby is the one member of the cannibal clan who wants
a different life. She will go to the point of killing a
family member to get free. And she returns Doug’s baby
to him. Otherwise there is nothing good about her
family…or at least none that the movie shows you. And yes,
the Carter family does get caught up in the violence and
becomes part of it.
But the screenplay and direction never
show you anything to suggest the Carter’s are
bad people, (except for some racist comments by the
father) or that (apart from Ruby) the cannibals
are good people. It is more like a documentary
showing a family of buffalo (or some other basically peaceful
animal) fighting back to protect their young against some
predator.
No doubt, this could have been a better movie with more
sympathy for the cannibals and less for the Carter’s.
But I don’t think this was what Craven had in mind. More on
that later.
The movie Deliverance was one
of the first to dump one more question in your lap before
walking away with no answer. That question is
this: Can you go into the wilderness and
kill people and then return to your old,
middle-class life?
At the end of the excellent novel
Deliverance, you get a little of the hero’s
long-term reflections about what he was forced to do, years
back. The movie simply ends, with no flash-forward.
The Hills Have Eyes also
stops short after the violence is done; you are left wondering
what will happen to the survivors.
Maybe Craven’s point (if he has a point) is
that the answer is yes. If you can deal with what
you did, and convince yourself there was no other
way, then you can return to your old life.
But you will be a changed person.
We hear the story of the Vietnam vet who says, even at
a birthday party where a dad hugs his kid and helps them open
presents; the vet can still see a man who is capable of random
killing, maybe torture, in the jungle.
The vet has been there with people, and seen
what they can become under the right
conditions. Especially when it comes to protecting our
families, almost all of us are capable of this kind of
violence. But we pray that we’ll never be in a situation
where we have to make that choice. The Hills Have Eyes is at its center, about bonds
between family members. With both of the
older generation in the family killed off, then their oldest
daughter, it is left up to Doug to save his
newborn daughter. As much as you have gotten to know
him, Doug is a quiet guy, and not particularly macho. But
with his daughter’s life on the line, he is ready to turn to
violence.
When I first saw this movie, I thought it made
kind of a positive statement about the typical American
family. How they stick together in a crisis. If they
(the Carter’s) had any other choices, I sure couldn’t see
any.
Like so many Vietnam veterans were forced to
do, these survivors will try to put their lives back together
again. (Craven had once been a war correspondent in Vietnam,
and more than likely the experience stayed in his
subconscious.) To me, the movie has done its job when
you sit there at the end, overwhelmed. Simply
not ready to give the future any thought. That’s
for another day.
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I had a lot of fears about being objective in
reviewing the re-make of The Hills. First,
because people have a special feeling about a movie they saw
before any of their friends, family and co-workers—you tend
to over-rate it a little. It feels like your
baby. Because you get the privilege of turning people
on to it.
That was my experience with the original. I
remember not finding a VHS or DVD tape of it for years, then
finally spotting one and telling my son, “You’ve got to
see this.”
When I saw that the remake was
produced by 20th Century Fox I got worried too; Bigger
does not always equal better.
But the remake is exceptionally true to the
spirit of the original. Not that the story and characters
are exactly the same; they are not. What I am happy to
say though; none of the changes are false steps, just about
every one works.
Set in New Mexico, the remake focuses more than
the original on the atomic bomb legacy of the 1950’s. The
monsters here originated from the generation of miners who were
ordered to evacuate the area , but refused to leave when
atomic bombs were tested. They survived the radioactive
fall-out but paid a heavy price. Each was deformed
physically; most became cannibalistic maniacs.
WORK IN PROGRESS