Five years after soon to be
horror maestro Wes Craven burst onto the horror scene with his still
transgressive exploitation shocker, The
Last House on the Left, the maverick director set out to more or less
retell the same story told by Last House by
transposing the revenge thriller where the hunters become the hunted in the dry
and barren Nevada desert, The Hills Have
Eyes. The now classic horror tale of
a vacationing family stranded in the desert who find themselves under attack
from cannibalistic deformed inbreeding mutants foraging in the rocky terrain
has since become the stuff of horror aficionado legend and introduced the world
to one of the most unexpected horror icons to grace the silver screen, actor
Michael Berryman. Despite coming under
fire for its sadistic violence, explicit gore including a controversial image
of a real disemboweled cadaver of a German Shepherd, and seemingly nasty lack
of a moral compass, the film is now considered an important staple in the
genre, further cementing Wes Craven’s status as a formidable horror director to
watch for while launching the career of Berryman.
Still a harrowingly gritty, blood, sweat and dust drenched swan dive into stark terror where the desert feels like a shark infested ocean and no one is safe, Craven’s horror show was all but unavailable for decades outside of worn and faded VHS copies until 2003 when Anchor Bay issued the film on DVD for the very first time. Despite housing plentiful extras and a collectible booklet, that disc was and still is a technical disappointment. Being shot on Super 16mm for budgetary reasons, the film’s heavy grain levels never seemed to be properly rendered thanks to the use of one of my biggest pet peeves on home video mastering: DNR (digital noise reduction). In a foolish practice akin to the colorization of black and white movies, DNR seeks to remove grain levels and try to make an older image look modern, resulting in an image that looks waxy, bereft of detail or depth of field. Worse still, in the case of something like The Hills Have Eyes, the artificial digital mastering technique produced a muddy, blurry looking image that simply put looks wrong. I’ve always enjoyed The Hills Have Eyes but my distaste for DNR couldn’t help but make it difficult to watch in the disc driven era of movie viewing, until now thanks to the efforts of the good folks at Arrow Video who have given the film a new 4K remaster supervised by the film’s producer Peter Locke.
Finally, Wes Craven’s horror
masterpiece looks correct with heavy film grain and startling amounts of detail
against the limitations of the source material.
While some fans may gripe about the absence of the 5.1 surround track
included on the Anchor Bay DVD, that newly created sound mix always sounded
like blown up mono anyway and lacks the crispness of the LPCM mono track on the
new Arrow blu-ray. Slated for a limited
collector’s edition release, Arrow Video has put together quite the collector’s
package here with six postcards, reversible cover art, a collectible booklet, a
full size poster, new audio commentaries by Berryman and the supporting cast as
well as porting all of the extras included in Anchor Bay’s 2003 DVD release,
the Criterion Collection of B movies have more than outdone themselves
here. It’s an impressive collector’s
edition that is sure to please Wes Craven fans and finally brings the gritty
looking shocker to home video as close to the look of the original theatrical
release as possible.
There are of course some
areas in the set Arrow couldn’t get their hands on, notably the legendarily
censored footage Craven was forced to cut to avoid an X rating. Having always been a lightning rod for
censorship with everything from The Hills
Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and
Scream facing heavy cuts, the trims
made to Eyes are considered to be
lost forever and are only known about through recollections of Craven and the
crew over the years. Even after the film
secured an R rating, Eyes still found
itself under fire in the UK when it was branded a “Video Nasty” by social activist
Mary Whitehouse who sought to ban the film completely from circulation and
further cuts to the R rated version were administered. It wasn’t until the dying out of the Video
Nasty movement and the 2003 Anchor Bay DVD that UK viewers finally got to see
the uncut R rated version issued in American cinemas.
In spite of the censorial shortcomings
stacked against the movie, The Hills Have
Eyes achieved such success that it spawned both a sequel in 1985 (later
disowned by Craven), a remake in 2006 directed by Alexandre Aja (reliant on CGI
and makeup over Berryman’s very real birth defects and physical deformities
however) and a 2007 sequel penned by Craven and son Jonathan. Despite the technological advances and harder
pushing of the envelope in the new movies, the meat and potatoes approach to
the original with Michael Berryman (the real deal) in such an iconic horror
film performance will always reign supreme in the eyes of horror film
fanatics. For me personally I still
prefer Craven’s The Last House on the
Left to it but it’s a solid reworking of the kindred themes of ordinary
nonviolent people who transform into savages under extreme duress coupled with
personal vendettas.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki