Hills Have Eyes Arrow

Low-budget horror hit a peak in the 70’s with films like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, breaking the barriers of good taste and the heretofore-predictable rules of scary movies audiences came to expect. These were the pioneers of the “anti-Hollywood” horror movie. While Hooper peaked with brief mainstream success as a director-for-hire on Spielberg's Poltergeist, Craven took the long road eventually getting his due with the Elm Street and Scream franchises. But he could never recapture the exploitation zeitgeist of his early work, especially The Hills Have Eyes, which tapped into an ugly mirror image of the American family that the director carried with him the rest of his career. The Carter family takes an ill-advised shortcut through an atomic test zone and winds up stranded in the middle of the desert. Their presence attracts the attention of a different sort of family altogether, inbred mutants who survive on human flesh and are planning to invite all the Carter's to dinner...even the 6-month old baby! Now both sides are in a desperate fight for survival with the Carter's getting a surprise assist from their German Shepherd who, as it turns out, has a taste for flesh of its own. Hills is a jury-rigged minor masterpiece, held together by sheer brute force and an overwhelming sense of dread; this is despite Craven's tendency to lay down the psychological subtext a bit thick, a flaw he carried with him most of his career. The set-piece scene that earned the film its reputation is a disturbingly violent attack at the family RV that includes one rape, two deaths and the aforementioned baby saved for dinner. Almost 30 years later, it still has the power to shock. But it's a step up from the truly tasteless sexual violence of Last House and proved, even at this crude level, Craven was learning how to play to a mass audience. And the fact the Hills is the work of a director in progress is hard to ignore. The staging is clumsy, even during the jump scares, and the mutant make-up / costumes are TV-movie level stuff at best (the film owes actor Michael Berryman's authentic odd features at great deal of gratitude). But Hills success and longevity is a testament to the Wes Craven's refusal to play it safe, stretching the definition of horror to match the era in which the film was made. Hills has popped up on home video several times, but it's never come close to looking this good! The new 4K restoration from Arrow Video adds a tremendous amount of detail and color but still looks like an exploitation film from the '70s. Most of the extras from previous versions are ported over (Craven and producer Peter Locke's audio commentary, the hour long documentary Looking Back on the Hills Have Eyes, trailers, still and the original screenplay on BD/DVD-ROM) but there are also some terrific new special features including two new audio commentaries (one featuring cast members and another more scholarly track with film historian Mikel Koven) and a sit-down interview with composer Don Peake. The film is playable in its original form (with its original mono soundtrack restored) or with it's more "audience-friendly" alternate ending, now presented in HD for the first time. Perks listed but not supplied for review include 6 postcards, a reversible foldout poster and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Brad Stevens.