The Carter family is traveling in their RV towards California. The quickest route seems to be the one that crosses the Nevada desert, which many believe is used by the army for unknown nuclear experiments. A breakdown caused by an accident forces the Carter family to spend the night in the middle of the desert, but soon they will become prey to a ruthless family of mutant cannibals living among the hills.
Famous as the second film by new horror master Wes Craven, "The Hills Have Eyes" arrives five years after his "The Last House on the Left" and, for the second time, undoubtedly leaves a mark in the dusty and bloody landscape of 1970s horror cinema. Clearly indebted to Hooper's masterpiece "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," Craven's film carries forward, and perhaps exaggerates, his sadistic poetic of family revenge: in "The Hills Have Eyes," as in "The Last House on the Left" and subsequently in other of his works, at the center of the plot is the American family, or rather families. There is the degenerate, deviant family, composed of deformed outcasts and man-eaters, and the respectable one, belonging to the middle class, whose only means of survival is to regress to bestiality and to put itself on par with the first family, that of monsters. American society, therefore, generates monsters and the monsters shape other monsters; but Craven's discourse is not restricted to the United States alone, but is much broader: it is human society that generates monsters, which lurk in the darkness of a cave among the desert hills, as well as in the innate instinct of survival of the mildest human being, ready to come out and attack and devour innocence (not by chance the primary objective of the cannibal family is to eat the newborn baby of the Carter family and the first member of the cannibal family to perish is the smallest and visibly retarded one).
Beyond the sociological interpretation, "The Hills Have Eyes" manages to have a great emotional impact on the viewer, generated by suggestive natural settings captured by a dirty and dusty photography, very much in the style of 1960s westerns, and by a violence, often only suggested, primordial and at times disturbing, made of men burned alive and knife wounds inflicted with animal ferocity. Inevitably, its release in theaters was accompanied by a sea of controversy (as had already happened with "The Last House on the Left" and "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre"), but also by a great public success that pushed Craven, in 1985, to direct a sequel, far removed from the charm that the first film conveys.
The cast of "The Hills Have Eyes" is essentially composed of faces not very well known to the public, with the exception of Dee Wallace (here in the role of Lynn, the older sister) who will be the protagonist of numerous horror films ("Howling," "Cujo," "Critters," "Time Warp"), but also in the very successful "E.T." by Spielberg. Another recurring face in genre cinema, and here present in the role of the cannibal Pluto, is that of Michael Berryman, an American character actor with an unmistakable physique for horror films, who will return directed by Craven in "Deadly Blessing," "Invitation to Hell," and "The Hills Have Eyes 2," as well as in "Cannibal Holocaust" by Deodato and "The Devil's Rejects" by Rob Zombie.
In conclusion, "The Hills Have Eyes" is one of the cornerstones of new horror, as well as one of Craven's best films. Gripping and disturbing. Essential viewing for a horror enthusiast.
Curiosity. Craven recounts that for the realization of the screenplay he was inspired by a fact that actually occurred in seventeenth-century Scotland.
There is a curious game of cinematic references between Wes Craven and Sam Raimi that has "The Hills Have Eyes" as the initiator: during Craven's film, one can glimpse on a wall inside the RV the torn poster of Spielberg's film "Jaws," as if to assert, on the part of the director, that one of his intentions was to succeed in making a film more frightening than the one with the killer shark. In one of the scenes of Raimi's cult film "The Evil Dead" one can glimpse on the wall of the basement the torn poster of "The Hills Have Eyes," a challenge that the director launched to Craven for the same reasons that pushed Craven to cite Spielberg's film. But Craven took up Raimi's challenge and returned the "favor" in "Nightmare," inserting in a scene a TV that was broadcasting "The Evil Dead."
Comments
Comments (0)
Comments