Wes Craven made big waves in three decades of horror history. Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes are prime examples of '70s exploitation. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Deadly Friend, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and Shocker are fun '80s funhouse horror. Scream brought the genre into the ironic nineties and revitalized the slasher movie for a new era and audience.

Craven now has a reputation as a thinking-person's horror director. His movies have subtext. They are intelligent and they deal with primal archetypes. You wouldn't have guessed it at the time The Hills Have Eyes was released. It and Last House on the Left made many think he was a demonic filmmaker with an obsession on violence and human suffering.

I could act like a half-assed prof and talk about The Hills Have Eyes being study of the dichotomy of humankind and the thin veneer between the civilized person and a savage. I suppose I could say The Hills Have Eyes is a sincere plea to end the development of nuclear power. Yeah yeah yeah, I've played that game in the past. It's often appropriate.

For me The Hills Have Eyes works best as pure, hard exploitation. A perfect film to show at a steamy southern drive-in or a sticky NYC grindhouse theater.

The details are as old as storytelling itself. A group of individuals is lost in a remote place. Something unknown, alien, and deadly is stalking them.

The movie is pretty rough around the edges, but the best, most visceral, and effective exploitation movies are usually crude and cheaply made. It can also be seen as a brutal modern western in the balls-out Peckinpah tradition.

In the odd chance you haven't seen The Hills Have Eyes, a bickersome family is traveling through the desert and have an accident, breaking their rear axle. Unbeknownst to them, a renegade family of mutants lives out there. They are the result of atomic testing in the area. The freaks see the stranded family as a source for food, supplies, and sporting fun.

While relatively bloodless, The Hills Have Eyes is an intense viewing experience. The family is terrorized, assaulted, and tortured. A baby is stolen for a potential succulent meal. A woman is raped, a dog is killed and eaten, and dear old dad is burned alive.

Craven felt violence should been shown as the atrocity it is. He hated things like True Lies, which portray killing as something fun. Most of us confront violence in our lives and he believed it should be portrayed honestly.

The Hills Have Eyes spawned a sequel, but after always hearing how weak it is, I never took the time to see the movie myself. One day I intend to do so.

Remakes were everywhere in the 2000s, and Craven produced new versions of The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left. Both are, I think, good movies, but The Hills Have Eyes is the better of the two. it was the height of the so-called Torture Porn heyday, and French director Alexandre Aja did a hell of a job with the Hills remake. I think it's one of the few that tops the original movie.

The Hills Have Eyes stands tall and proud as a near-classic of its time. A signpost of the glorious days of lean and mean horror before things became too clean and gimmicky. Like the unlucky family in the movie, Craven and his crew took to the desert with very little money and limited gear, unsure of their prospects of success, and made horror history.

Written by Mark Sieber

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