Available on limited edition Blu-Ray & DVD
What killed the video nasty? Back in the 1980’s the slasher movie, available on video cassette, was depicted in the newspapers as a major threat to civilization – something worthy of banning at any rate. One of the golden 70’s classics, newly available for home viewing – along with the stunningly tacky Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the delightful Driller Killer – is The Hills Have Eyes.
The vacationing Carter family (a kind of Partridge family manqué) are travelling with their trailer and station wagon across the desert to California, complete with pets and moody teenagers in skimpy leisurewear that are a convention of the genre. They plough on despite the gas station old-timer’s warnings of trouble in them thar hills. The land has been used as an atom bomb testing site and hiding out is a nuclear family of numbskulls. Guess what? The Carters break down and not even their CB radio can save them. As soon as the buzzards begin to swoop it’s a given that that the straights will battle the freaks. When mom asks for a group hug and the Lord’s protection you know the family is doomed. (Wes Craven rejected the fundamentalist Baptist church in which he was brought up. Something the church is probably mighty thankful for.)
Even with guns and two Alsatians, the ’burbanites seem easy pickings. Like the genre-defying noir Leave Her to Heaven, Hills is a horror set in bright daylight. The Mojave Desert locations recall westerns of yore and the lethally insistent score (Don Peake) adds to the menace.
Some 40 years after this curio was made the sight of women being watched, not to mention a (truncated) rape scene make for uncomfortable viewing. The weirdos bring out the buck knives, there’s a dead dog, an abducted baby, much screaming from the womenfolk, a propane gas explosion, heads bitten off budgies… in fact something to offend everyone. The feral family in the hills are cannibals (a nod to the 17th-century Scottish tale of Sawney Bean) and when they see the pink-swaddled infant all their turkey dinners have come at once.
It’s all glorious low-budget stuff that is now rather showing its age and, subsequently, difficult to take seriously. This is not the big-budget torture porn of the more recent Hostel and Saw series which are sophisticated by comparison. Someone is stabbed in the leg and when the blood oozes out it’s as bright as barbecue ketchup. There’s some off-putting post-dubbing and a few glaringly laughable continuity errors. The acting is often too strident. The tension, however, ratchets up as the white-bread family become as feral and aggressive as the attackers. Black humour leavens the load, as when one of the Carter family dies and is propped up on a garden chair as ‘bait’. The cannibals with their bone jewellery and wild hair are from Central Casting. If only psycho killers were so dependently weird looking in real life. Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was a handsome dude, the Manson girls were former-prom queens.