The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Martin Speer

Susan Lanier

Robert Houston

Janus Blythe

Lance Gordon

Dee Wallace

***The Hills Have Eyes*** is a 1977 American horror film written, directed, and edited by Wes Craven and starring Michael Berryman, Susan Lanier and Dee Wallace. The film follows the Carters, a suburban family targeted by a family of cannibal savages after becoming stranded in the Nevada desert.

## Plot

The suburban Carter family is traveling on vacation towing a travel trailer from Ohio to Los Angeles. Parents Bob and Ethel are driving, accompanied by their teenage children Bobby, Brenda, eldest daughter Lynne, Lynne's husband Doug, Lynne and Doug's baby daughter Katy, and the family's dogs, Beauty and The Beast.

In Nevada, they stop at Fred's Oasis for fuel, and Fred urges them to stay on the main road as they leave. Fred's truck suddenly explodes. Dismissing Fred's warnings as a crazy person's ramblings, the Carters skid off a desert road and crash. The dogs become very panicky and start barking at the hills. Beauty then runs off into the hills. Chasing after her, Bobby finds her mutilated body. Frightened, he runs, falls, and knocks himself unconscious.

Bob walks back to Fred's Oasis to get help. As night falls, he finds Fred, who tells him about his son Jupiter. As a child, Jupiter killed the family's livestock and later murdered his sister. Fred attacked Jupiter with a tire iron and left him in the hills to die. However, Jupiter survived and had children with a depraved, alcoholic prostitute known as Mama. Together, they had three sons – Mars, Pluto and Mercury – and an abused daughter, Ruby. The family led by "Papa Jupiter" survives by cannibalizing travelers and stealing supplies. Papa Jupiter suddenly crashes through a window, kills Fred with a tire iron, takes Bob prisoner, and crucifies him.

Brenda finds Bobby, still shaken up about Beauty, and the two return to the trailer. Bobby does not mention Beauty's death to avoid frightening the rest of the family. Pluto sneaks the trailer and signals Papa Jupiter to set Bob on fire as a distraction. While Brenda stays in the trailer with Katy, Ethel, Lynne, Doug, and Bobby rush out to save Bob. The Carters eventually extinguish the fire, but Bob dies shortly afterwards.

As the Carters extinguish the fire, Pluto and Mars ransack the camper and Mars rapes Brenda. When Ethel and Lynne return, Mars shoots them both. Pluto abducts Katy and the brothers flee, intending for the family to eat her. Hearing their screams, Doug and Bobby rush back only to find Lynne dead, Ethel mortally wounded and Brenda traumatized.

Mars and Pluto return to their home, a cave. The Beast pushes Mercury off a hilltop to his death. Mama chains Ruby outside the cave, torments her and forces her to eat Beauty as punishment for sympathizing with the Carters. The next morning, shortly after Ethel dies, Doug sets out to find Katy while Papa Jupiter and Pluto set out to kill the remaining family members.

The Beast tears Pluto's throat out. Brenda and Bobby use Ethel's corpse as a trap to kill Papa Jupiter. Doug gets to the cave, where he sees Ruby knocking out Mama and carrying Katy away. Doug catches up with Ruby, but Mars follows and attacks Doug. Mars gains the upper hand, but Ruby interferes, enabling Doug to overpower him. Doug then savagely stabs Mars and continues long after he is dead, whilst Ruby weeps and the screen fades to red.

## Cast

* Martin Speer as Doug Wood
* Susan Lanier as Brenda Carter
* Robert Houston as Bobby Carter
* Dee Wallace as Lynne Carter
* Virginia Vincent as Ethel Carter
* Russ Grieve as Bob Carter
* Janus Blythe as Ruby
* Cordy Clarke as Mama
* Lance Gordon as Mars
* James Whitworth as Jupiter
* Michael Berryman as Pluto
* Peter Locke as Mercury
* John Steadman as Fred

## Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, *The Hills Have Eyes* holds a 64% approval rating based on 25 critic reviews, with an average rating of 6.09/10. The consensus reads: "When it's not bludgeoning the viewer with its more off-putting, cruder elements, *The Hills Have Eyes* wields some clever storytelling and a sly sense of dark humor." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews". The film was included in the book *1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die*, where Steven Jay Schneider said it "warrants consideration as one of the richest and most perfectly realized films of Craven's career". *Fangoria* listed the film as one of the thirteen greatest horror films of the 1970s while *Film Journal International* has cited *The Hills Have Eyes* as a classic grindhouse feature. The film was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills. *TV Guide* gave it a three out of four stars rating, saying that it is "exhilarating" to watch the Carters become more savage.

*Slant Magazine*'s Eric Henderson called the film "effective" and praised its cast, particularly Robert Houston, whose performance is "more complex than your average male lead in a horror film." However, Henderson also deemed the film inferior to *The Texas Chainsaw Massacre* and criticized the sequence where the Carters create booby traps for feeling like *Looney Tunes* cartoons about Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Dread Central's Jon Condit opined that *The Hills Have Eyes* is not one of Craven's best films. In *Empire*, Kim Newman gave the film a three out of five star rating, saying "Decades on *The Hills Have Eyes* no longer seems quite as breathlessly swift as it did." A critic for *IndieWire* dismissed the film as middling.