Taglines: Camping out with the family can be murder.
The Hills Have Eyes movie storyline. While traveling in a trailer through the desert to California, the retired detective Big Bob Carter stops in an isolated gas station with his family for fueling and rest. Bob is traveling with his wife Ethel, his son Bobby, his daughters Brenda and Lynn and his son-in-law and Lynn’s husband Doug and their daughter baby Katy. When they leave the gas station, the owner advises Bob to stay in the main road.
However, the stubborn driver takes a shortcut through a nuclear testing site and wrecks his station wagon. With the family stranded in the middle of nowhere, Bob and Doug walk on the road trying to find some help. Bob is captured by an insane and sadistic member of a deranged evil family that lives nearby the spot. Doug returns to the trailer, and along the night the Carter family is attacked by a group of psychotic cannibal criminals. Absolutely trapped by the murderers, they have to fight to survive.
The Hills Have Eyes is a 1977 American horror film written, directed, and edited by Wes Craven and starring Susan Lanier, Michael Berryman and Dee Wallace. The film follows the Carters, a suburban family targeted by a family of cannibal savages after becoming stranded in the Nevada desert.
Following Craven’s directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), producer Peter Locke was interested in financing a similar project. Craven based the film’s script on the legend of cannibal Sawney Bean, which Craven viewed as illustrating how supposedly civilized people could become savage. Other influences on the film include John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The Hills Have Eyes was shot in the Mojave Desert. The film’s crew were initially unenthusiastic about the project, but this changed as they came to believe that they were making a special movie.
The Hills Have Eyes earned $25 million at the box office and spawned a franchise. All subsequent films in the series were made with Craven’s involvement. The Hills Have Eyes was released on VHS in 1988 and has subsequently been released on DVD and Blu-ray, while Don Peake’s score for the film has been released on CD and vinyl. Reviews for the film were mostly positive, with critics praising its tense narrative and humor. Some critics have interpreted the film as containing commentary on morality and American politics, and the film has since become a cult classic.
Craven directed a sequel to the film, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, which was released in 1985. Craven made the film to turn The Hills Have Eyes into a series, in the vein of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the late 1980s, Craven considered making a film in the series set in outer space, but it never came to fruition. The unrelated Craven project Mind Ripper (1995) was originally going to be a third The Hills Have Eyes movie, but it was re-written so that it never directly refers to The Hills Have Eyes or its sequel. Mind Ripper still has the alternative title The Hills Have Eyes III. Alexandre Aja directed a remake of The Hills Have Eyes in 2006, which Craven produced.[50] In 2007, Craven and his son Jonathan wrote the sequel to the remake, The Hills Have Eyes 2.
About the Story
The film begins somewhere in the rural southwest USA in a desert ghost town. At the town’s sole gas station, called Fred’s Oasis, an old man named Fred (John Steadman) is seen packing his truck and drinking alcohol, looking very worried. He frequently glances at the arid and barren landscape around him, and makes continual comments about “them” and what “they” would do to him if they ever found out he was escaping.
Suddenly, a ragged and somewhat feral teenage girl turns up. Annoyed, Fred asks the girl at what she is doing there… addressing her as Ruby (Janus Blythe). She offers to trade what she has in her bag for food and the old man refuses. They move into a small cabin to talk and Fred scolds her for what she and “they” have done recently. Ruby says that her family ambushed a group of passing tourists at the nearby closed-down airfield because they were hungry and no one passes by their home anymore.
She pleads with Fred to take her away with him, but he mocks her and says she could never live with normal people in an urban environment. He demands to know whether “the pack,” in particular someone named Jupiter, knows what she is doing. He warns her of the danger she is in if Jupiter knows, and she retorts that her “Pa” would do the same to Fred if he knew he was getting away from town. A noise distracts them and Ruby hides.
A large stationwagon pulling a large trailer pulls into the filling station. They make up of Carter family on vacation. They make up of 65-year-old Bob Carter (Russ Grieve) a retired policeman and his homemaker wife Ethel (Virginia Vincent). They are driving the family car accompanied by their twin teenage children Bobby (Robert Houston), and Brenda (Susan Lanier), and eldest daughter Lynne (Dee Wallace), along with Lynne’s husband Doug (Martin Speer) and their baby daughter Katy (Brenda Marinoff). They stop at Fred’s Oasis for fuel and to allow themselves and the family’s German Shepherd dogs, Beauty and Beast, to stretch. Bob asks Fred for directions to the nearby interstate for they are on their way to California to visit an old silver mine left behind by the late Bob’s father. Fred tells them to be sure and stay on the main road.
Later, as the Carter family continue on their way, the road they are traveling on becomes an unpaved dirt road and soon they skid off the road and crash their station wagon (due to what is revealed to be a booby-trap). Bob leaves Bobby a pistol and heads back to Fred’s Oasis on foot to get help. Doug heads off in the forward direction hoping to find someone. Ethel, Bobby, Brenda, and Lynne remain behind with the trailer and their car, which upon inspection has a broken axle.
When one of the family dogs, Beauty, runs off, Bobby chases after her, only to find the dog dead having been killed and disemboweled by unseen assailants who are spying on the Carter family from the nearby hills and communicating with each other by walkie-talkies. Bobby returns to the trailer, but keeps the information to himself. Doug returns soon after, telling them that the dirt road led to a dead end and that he found numerous abandoned vehicles in a large crater at the end of the desert road. When Bobby tries to use their CB radio to call for help, they recieve strange responses from the other end of the line.
As night falls, Bob has arrived back at the gas station, where Fred attacks him then tells him the origin of the hill people. It turns out that Fred’s son, Jupiter, and Jupiter’s family of deranged cannibals dwell in the barren wilderness through which the Carters are traveling. They are commanded by Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth), the patriarch of the clan. He was born a mongoloid monster and killed his mother, Fred’s wife, at childbirth.
As a child he was vicious and brutal, killing all the livestock on his father’s farm, then eventually murdering his sister. Fred eventually reached a breaking point, attacking his son with a tire iron and leaving him in the wilderness to die. The young Jupiter survived, and began living with a depraved, alcoholic prostitute known as Mama. Together they had three sons, the vicious Mars (Lance Gordon), the bald and hideous thug Pluto (Michael Berryman), and the mentally retarded Mercury (Pete Locke) as well as their abused daughter Ruby. They survive in the desert by stealing from and cannibalizing all who cross their path.
Papa Jupiter arrives, beats Fred to death with a crowbar, and takes Bob prisoner. Back at the stranded vehicle, Doug and Lynne are spending the night in the family car while everyone else stays in the large trailer. Bobby gets locked out of the trailer and asks Doug for his set of keys. Bobby does not know that the trailer is locked because Pluto is inside looking through their valuables for food while Ethel and Brenda are asleep in the next room.
As Bobby uses the keys to enter the trailer, Papa Jupiter sets Bob ablaze on a stake out in the near distance to create a distraction. Ethel, Lynne, Doug, and Bobby rush to Bob, while Brenda stays in the trailer with the baby. Everyone tries to help extinguish the fire, while Pluto reveals himself in the trailer and attacks Brenda. Mars jumps down from the top of the trailer, goes inside, and rapes Brenda. The rest of the Carters extinguish the fire, but Bob dies shortly after.
When Ethel and Lynne return to the trailer Pluto jumps out and runs away. Lynne rushes inside to find Mars taking her baby. She attacks Mars as Ethel steps in and hits him with a broom. Mars pulls out a gun and shoots Ethel in the stomach. Brenda rushes in and throws Lynne a knife, which she uses to stab Mars in the leg until he shoots her in the stomach as well. Pluto returns to abduct the baby for a cannibalistic meal and he flees with Mars. Doug rushes in to find his wife dead and Ethel dies shortly thereafter.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Directed by: Wes Craven
Starring: Susan Lanier, Robert Houston, Martin Speer, Dee Wallace, Russ Grieve, John Steadman, Michael Berryman, Virginia Vincent, Lance Gordon, Michael Berryman, Janus Blythe, Brenda Marinoff
Screenplay by: Wes Craven
Cinematography by: Eric Saarinen
Film Editing by: Wes Craven
Costume Design by: Joanne Jaffe
Art Direction by: Robert A. Burns
Music by: Don Peake
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Vanguard
Release Date: July 22, 1977
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