The Hills Have Eyes

I can appreciate the way Wes Craven used a natural setting in this movie to evoke a sense of dread in the audience. The wide open spaces, the remoteness of where the family breaks down, the jagged rock formations of the nearby hills, all of it creates an atmosphere unlike most other horror movies. There are no hallways, no rooms, no showers to hide in. Likewise, I can appreciate the villains of the movie for not being the cliched idiot hillbillies one usually sees in the “group gets lost and beset upon by psychos” subgenre of horror. They’re intelligent, strategic, and ruthless not because they’re mindlessly malicious but because they’ve resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Murder to us is hunting to them. What I can’t appreciate is the glacial pace this movie goes at for the first 60 minutes, and how the last 30, which are the most action packed, feel like a slog as well. Every minute of this movie just drags on. Is it because there’s very little to the hour of build-up beyond people complaining about being lost? Is it because the characters are either miserable, annoying, stupid, or a combination of all of those traits? Is it because the one decent character (played by Dee Wallace) is killed off? I mean, yes to all of it, but it’s also just so damned by the numbers. I mean, it never promises anything but being what it is, but it’s that there’s a tighter, more frenetic, more intense version of this movie being held back. What’s left is nothing you haven’t seen before.