02/23/10 - The Hills Have Eyes

The Hills Have Eyes (1977, 89 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077681/

I choose not to attend the Weird Wednesday fare and instead opt for the Terror Tuesday showing. This was mainly because this was a well respected movie in The Hills Have Eyes while Weird Wednesday featured something not even remotely noteworthy.

The film stars a group of tourists investigating a silver mine in the desert. Little do they know that a group of "mutants" also lives there and that they attack those that come through the area. The movie follows this family as they attempt to save themselves from these desert dwellers.

There's quite a lot of people in The Hills Have Eyes so I didn't list any actors. It's mainly because we have one entire family of travelers and another family of the mutants, so it's a large cast. Not many are that fleshed out but are all flat characters that mesh up well together. I guess this is standard horror film fare, but I don't know. Overall, the balance was fine between all the characters. The only one I really disliked was one of the daughters of the family as she constantly shrieked and screamed which became more grating the longer the movie lasted.

Speaking of movie length, 89 minutes was a pretty solid runtime. There was a short section used for building up the story and then the crash of the family that resulted in their being stranded. The worst part of the movie in my opinion was actually right after the crash where the movie was setting itself up for the mutant attacks but it also had to focus on the father who was going off in search of help. Here, it ended up jumping around between the one boy chasing the dogs, the people at the crash site and the father and it created an odd balance. Other times, when there were less groups to focus on, the movies splicing was pretty good.

The family had a good sense of loneliness in my opinion. I really got the impression that they were really truly helpless out there in the middle of nowhere. Sure, being in the middle of nowhere is bad enough but I liked how smart the mutants were portrayed. It enhanced this feeling of hopelessness. Personally, I would have liked more if the one mutant girl didn't turn "good" near the end to save the group, but that's just me. But even with this overall good feeling, I never got scared or jumped from what happened. It was okay horror but I never tensed up at what was happening on screen. Maybe it was particularly jarring for 1977, though, I can't be sure.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. The Hills Have Eyes does a lot "good" but never really does anything to make itself very good or great. It's memorable for some of the weird mutant characters, but that's about it. All this results in a 6/10 rating.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of The Hills Have Eyes to a 5/10.]