There is something enigmatic about the desert. Few places on Earth are as wild and unforgiving as open dunes with nothing but snakes and heat. Wes Craven, the face of horror, has increased the danger and turned from something vast and monstrous into a place that is downright terrifying. Far off the beaten track with the old gas station and the older crazed man giving strange warnings, there is an evil far more sinister than the vast unknown. It comes from the womb and neglects what we call "humanity".
A family of seven are stranded in the middle of this desert somewhere in the southwest United States on their way to California. Gas Station Man told them not to go to the silver mine, it's been cleared out for years. Brenda told them they should press on to L.A., full of fast cars and movie stars. Ethel should not have been put in charge of the maps. Now with a shot axle the group is stuck with nothing but their camper between them and...the desert. My opinion would be to split up to try and find people--that was their's too.
The first half of Craven's "Hills" is satisfying and frightening. A child born wrong became a beast of a man, living in the desert and populating his own clan of misshapen cave dwellers with a prostitute he snatched. They forage and scrounge from the wilderness and trade what they can find from the discards of the nearby military base. But times are tough. Dogs are good to eat, but not nearly as tasty as a fat, little mid-west baby.
The film starts out so strong because we don't know what's lurking in the hills. They seem to be human and we even meet one of the more docile of the bunch, Ruby. But peering into the darkness and seeing nothing but bushes and cacti, hearing strange animal cries, and having your two pet German Shepard's whimpering is rather disconcerting. The first attacks on the trailer are very scary until we see what it is we are up against. There are killings, of course, and a couple of them are very unsettling; Cravens anti-religious themes are strong.
The second half is as weak as the first was strong, however. The film begs the question at what point do "civilized" people become monsters themselves? It answers that the switch is almost immediate, which is not a novel idea. There are films, though, that tackle the repercussions of what that switch means which this film certainly does not. It devolves from a good, scary horror flick into something more of a thriller and a revenge film which became dull.
Also, the people living in the mountains are not that scary at all. To be fair, I would be scared shit-less if I met one of them walking down the street, but this ended up feeling like more of a "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" ripoff, and a far less effective one at that. I hate comparing films to remakes or originals if I can help it, but I have to say that I prefer the 2006 adaptation much more. Of course, it had a far larger budget than this shoe-string, pulp favorite, but there was something so carnally gruesome about the idea of people mutated by the effects of fallout in New Mexico (though maybe it just made me uneasy as I used to live about twenty minutes away from where they filmed). Certainly, it does seem a bit tactless to turn something like the atomic bomb tests into a horror film--though not nearly as much so as the new film "Chernobyl Diaries"--but then at least the story seemed to make a bit more sense.
As a classic horror film I feel compelled to say that it's worth a view, but as far as if it is any good I can list you half a dozen films made at the same time that deserve your attention much more.
1.5/4
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