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 young 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, 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.
· 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