Tears For Fears: The Crying Lame

Welcome back to my Tears for Fears marathon, where I will be covering every movie featuring the Mexican folk legend La Llorona in anticipation of her newest movie in April...

Year: 2007

Director: Benjamin Williams

Cast: Tom Parker, Ana Patricia Rojo, Dee Wallace

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of the reasons I love exploring low budget cinema is the people making it. They exist in a space entirely separate from Hollywood. Sure, this means sometimes (in fact, most times) the films aren't particularly well made and frequently aren't very "good," by the most objective measurement of cinema it's possible to use. But the stories these people choose to tell tend to be entirely personal and unique, free of the rules, restrictions, and tampering of the studio system. Even when they're doing their best to imitate Hollywood genres and tropes, it's distorted through the lens of an entirely non-professional person in a distinctly non-Hollywood place.

This was true of 1991's atrocious La Llorona, which was a lovely exploration of a Mexican fishing village that thought it was a scary movie about La Llorona. 2007's J-ok'el (pronounced "Joe-quelle") is certainly better, but works in a very similar anthropological vein. From square one, in fact. J-ok'el is a name for La Llorona apparently taken from the indigenous Mayan dialect of Tzotzil, something I never would have learned if not for this deeply bland, mediocre film.

Whoops, did I show my hand too early?

When his half-sister joins the ranks of a rising number of missing children in Chiapas, Mexico, American George Christensen (Tom Parker) arrives in town to investigate her disappearance. He enlists the help of Carmen Romero (Ana Patricia Rojo), a local woman who has offered to translate, and pointedly does not receive the help of his estranged mother Helen (Dee Wallace), who resents him for not having visited her in a decade.

What he's being doing for all these years, we'll never know because this movie doesn't care about such pretty things as his life before, how he can afford to spend so much time away from work, or what he's interested in beyond denouncing superstition and religions bullshit so Carmen can hem and haw and give this film its only minuscule scrap of conflict. Of course George is wrong. J-ok'el is haunting the town, snatching away children who live in broken homes.

The sheer amount of broken homes in this small town is not subtext, nor something the film remotely wishes to explore. In case you were wondering.

So! J-ok'el is, almost completely by accident, an expression of the racial and social strata of Chiapas. Its plot primarily follows the separation between a white American family and the town itself. Though Helen has lived in town for many years, married a high class local, and is an honorary member of the community, she rarely strays away from her resort-like mansion. And though George assures himself he cares about all the children in town, not just his sister, his refusal to accept the beliefs and traditions of Chiapas is a constant impediment to his investigation (in one of the first scenes, the police worry about how it would look if they gave preferential treatment to the needs of a white stranger more than that of the locals - in fact, its depiction of the police is frequently J-ok'el's most intentional and interesting facet throughout).

But on top of that, J-ok'el also depicts the strained relationship between the local Mexicans and the indigenous people who live just outside of town. The Llorona figure haunting this movie is implicitly blamed on them, and that's no accident. 

Of course, this is all Yours Truly reading between the lines on a tedious movie that mostly wants to be a Lifetime mystery about Mexican folklore. But the fact is, everything I mentioned is present, purposeful or not. Benjamin Williams' choice to film and set the movie in Chiapas (presumably a town the producer lives in or at least has some familiarity with or access to) gives it a texture and complexity it wouldn't have has if it was a Hollywood production set in some nameless desert town.

And though Parker would be surely cut out of a full-on Hollywood production, weirdly, Dee Wallace would probably still be in it. That woman has noting but hustle.

And now, the hammer falls. J-ok'el is a rough watch. It has decent cinematography and an almost too good score, but it lacks even a frisson of horror. The bulk of the movie involves itself with George wandering around being an asshole to natives, but when the alleged scary scenes creep in, they deflate even the milquetoast, flabby tension the film drums up between its characters. It's astonishingly lame; J-ok'el is depicted almost entirely by a bit of white cloth flicked in front of the camera by some offscreen P.A. 

This is arguably in service of a third act twist (a twist that both destroys every potential coherent theme the film might have built while simultaneously redeeming the whole affair by centering a totally batshit performance and hilariously out of left field), but in this cassette end utterly fails to justify the means. The means still could have tried to be scary or atmospheric, instead of flat and ploddingly edited.

By the time it gets to the bizarre interludes where George chats up a random French woman in a bar, or awkwardly interacts with a stock footage leopard, you're begging on your hands and knees for the torment to end. And the plot's complete failure to be interesting does little to distract you from how much it's riddled with holes (why exactly are there still children playing outside alone at night two weeks deep into an unprecedented spate of kidnappings?).

J-ok'el at least had the slightest sense of what it was capable of, which blows the '91 Llorona out of the water. But literally the only viable reason to watch this is if ou want to follow along with my marathon but hate subtitles and are thus incapable of watching the many other, better, non-English entries therein.

TL;DR: J-ok'el is surprisingly well made for such tragically tedious BS.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1035

You Can't Kill The Boogeyman

Year: 2007

Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Steady breathing helped me through Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. During Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, I bit the bullet so hard that I blew off my lower jaw. But if there’s a franchise film waiting for me that is somehow more unendurably agonizing than Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween, I’d rather slit my own throat with a steak knife like Kellan Lutz in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 than put it in my eyes.

I actually tried to approach this one with an open mind, considering that I knew it was inevitable in my marathon and that my opinion may have changed in the six years since I saw this film. Guess what? It didn’t. It makes me physically ill to think about the fact that I own this film, curse my completionist compulsions. Well, might as well get this review over with, so I never have to think about this film ever again.

Let the healing process begin.

Halloween tells the sordid tale of masked murderer Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) and his pursuit of Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her friends Annie (Danielle Harris, who played seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) one fateful Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. Oh, but first let’s give that faceless cypher of pure evil a backstory – because we saw Halloween but didn’t actually understand it. Could it even be possible that Dr. Loomis didn’t monologue hard enough on that topic?

Cue 45 minutes of pointless shrieking and bloodshed, where young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) deals with his stripper mom, his abusive stepdad, his skanky sister, and school bullies while trying to care for his baby sister Laurie. Yep, of all the things to grab from the Halloween sequels, they picked that little nugget. Why not just throw in Paul Rudd and the Cult of Thorn for good measure? I could accept this meaningless diversion as a new, if unappealing, take on an iconic character except for the fact that, halfway through, the film abruptly slams into a Cliff’s Notes speedthrough of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Laurie Strode’s greatest hits play out, careening from scene to scene with exact shot matching and dialogue quotations. This crude summation of the source material completely undermines the opening sequence. It’s difficult to imply that your serial killer has a dark backstory when you’re carbon copying a story that requires none at all. The film’s absurd sympathy for its central psychopath utterly obliterates the character of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who is yoked to the psychological damage perspective of the material yet forced to contort into the Donald Pleasance mold of frantic harbinger of doom. It’s an embarrassing mess too keen on paying grubby homage to the original to properly tend to its own machinations.

I guess it’s too much to ask that one of these marathons end on a high note.

To say that this film tarnishes the legacy of the original is to merely scratch the surface of its film-disintegrating flaws. Rob Zombie extends every sequence to a punishing length, attempting to drive his points home via sheer quantity. This is a relatively streamlined slasher tale that takes 110 grueling minutes to tell, all because Zombie can’t throttle his self-indulgent excess. Halloween is a monument to the director’s inflated ego, and I didn’t even watch the extended cut, many scenes of which are actually necessary to understand the chopped-up storyline, but which sours the pot with an unnecessary, ugly rape sequence. Also, it’s not like I’m champing at the bit to spend more time with this flick. It’s sweltering this far up Rob Zombie’s ass.

The experience of watching Halloween is just brutal. Not in a Last House on the Left “show me violence to abhor violence” way, but in a pointlessly mean attempt at shoving the series over the top. Michael’s relentless pounding (he traffics in Costco kills – you might only need one stab or head slam, but you’re gonna get twenty) pushes and pushes until it’s just a dull, monotonous roar that ceases to be unsettling or even recognizable as distinct action. Of course, this is a damn sight preferable to the actual roar of noise that accompanies the film, a ceaseless cacophony of demented shouting, sirens, screaming, screeching, and thumping that will takes twelve Advils and a lifetime of therapy to forget.

It’s – quite literally in some cases – overkill.

Of course, this all plays into Rob Zombie’s deranged redneck aesthetic. In his world, every human being is either a lewd, angry lowlife or a lewd, shrieking harpy. His M.O. seems to be “do exactly the same thing as before, only more vulgar.” We get a wholly arbitrary scene of Michael’s mom stripping, implied incest, a sweatily extended topless sequence of almost every female character (including Danielle Harris, who is definitely not seven years old anymore), and a heaping pile of F-bombs thrown at innocuous scenes – including the “grave is missing” and “get me a beer” sequences, inexplicably. 

Some lines seem to be constructed entirely by spinning  wheel of vulgarities, like the sublimely nonsensical [NSFW “That’s some deep-ass serious faggoty-ass shit.”] Even virginal Laurie is a shrill wretch who likes to joke about molestation and mock her babysittee Tommy Doyal (who is also a little turd, though his screen time is far shorter). They even manage to muck up offscreen sweetheart Ben Traemer. It’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, Zombie’s attempt to create a Tobe Hooper-esque atmosphere of cultural depravity merely fosters an environment where the evil of Michael Myers utterly fails to stand out. Among this leering, lecherous bunch, Michael is about as provocative as Mr. Bean. And with Laurie off pretending to bang Annie in front of some third graders, there’s no force of good to root for either. Halloween is completely rudderless.

It’s downright repugnant, but worst of all, it’s graceless. I could handle a nasty flick with dirty intentions, but the thing isn’t even made particularly well at most levels. The script is a bludgeoning tool, slamming the audience with exposition like Laurie telling Tommy, “I’m your babysitter.” The documentary-like shooting style only surfaces when it will most wrench you out of the movie (sometimes obscuring entire scenes behind irrelevant foreground objects). And it has the sheer gall to drag Carpenter’s score into this mess, lifting entire tracks in a futile attempt to polish the turd. 

The film’s wretched devotion to the original even forces the young actresses to use corded phones, which are about as foreign to 2007 as the cotton gin. I don’t know which is worse, the blatant copying or the tactless additions. Every second you watch this movie without turning it off, the devil’s fist grips your soul a little tighter.

They even disembowel “Mr. Sandman” when you least expect it. RIP.

OK, now’s the time where my shriveled heart grows three sizes and I scrape up some reluctant praise. Occasionally, Zombie will compose a shot that doesn’t repel the eye – including my favorite, a frozen-in-time shot of the paramedics arriving at the Myers house. Though of course it is deflated by a finale that sees young Michael turn directly to the camera like he’s Kevin Spacey in House of Cards. And I must admit there’s some pretty decent acting going on. 

Taylor-Compton has enough charisma to garner a modicum of sympathy for her plight (though she isn’t even in the same dimension as Jamie Lee Curtis), Danielle Harris throws herself full tilt into the physicality of her role so well that she earned an unscripted survival for her character, and Malcolm McDowell does what he can to keep the Loomis character from totally splitting in two, and delivers one of the film’s funniest lines with an excellent, off-the-cuff earnestness. Of course, he butchers the iconic Boogeyman line. Though let it be know that I blame absolutely none of the actors for any deficiencies in bringing this putrid, inhuman script to life.

OK, I’m calming down. The one unequivocally good element of the film is Michael Myers’ design and stature. Tyler Mane is a staggering hulk of a man and his sheer size provides intimidation that the scrip can only reach in its wet dreams. Honestly, the scariest thing about the film is that Mane is actually that size in real life. 

I’d hate to have been on his high school basketball team. 

And the mask itself is a pretty slick design, with an edgy decayed look that actually helps me understand what Rob Zombie was attempting to accomplish when he set out on his project. Then there's the rest of the film, which just makes me want to rage vomit. 

So there you have it, Michael Myers has been pulled into the modern age, however unsuccessfully it may be. I’d be celebrating the end of another successful marathon, but of course this puddle of donkey milk was so lucrative, they went ahead and asked Rob Zombie to shoot a sequel.

Scratch what I said. Pure evil is real.

Killer: Michael Myers (Tyler Mane)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)

Best Kill: About five seconds in, the spirit of John Carpenter’s Halloween is eviscerated.

Sign of the Times: Awful remakes were pretty much the cinematic currency of the mid to late 2000’s.

Scariest Moment: Right when it seems to end, you realize there’s 20 minutes left.

Weirdest Moment: Michael performs his first murder in a KISS T-shirt.

Champion Dialogue: “I got a Taco Deluxe Supreme talkin’ back at me, so I’m gonna be a while.”

Body Count: (Before reading this number, remember that high body counts are usually a sign of desperation and that the original Halloween boasts a measly 5) 21, not including 2 bloody attempted murders.

1. Wesley is beaten to death with a tree branch.
2. Ronnie gets his throat slit.
3. Steven is beaten to death with a bat.
4. Judith is stabbed in the gut and slashed to death.
5. Nurse has her throat slashed.
6. Mrs. Myers shoots herself.
7. Security Guard #1 is smashed with a chain.
8. Security Guard #2 is smashed with a chain.
9. Security Guard #3 has his head smashed into a wall.
10. Security Guard #4 is shot.
11. Security Guard #5 has her throat slit.
12. Gloria has her throat slit.
13. Ismael is downed and has a TV slammed onto his head.
14. Joe Grizzly is stabbed in the gut.
15. Bob is pinned to a wall through the chest.
16. Lynda is strangled.
17. Mr. Strode is punched in the face with a knife.
18. Mrs. Strode has her neck snapped.
19. Paul is stabbed to death.
20. Cop #1 is stabbed in the back.
21. Cop #2 is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Halloween is a vicious, inept film that destroys every last bit of goodwill the franchise had left, which wasn't much to begin with.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1818
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Splatter University 4: Cockneys and Werewolves and Lovecraftian Lamprey Monsters, Oh My!

This Monday was the last official lecture class in my Horror Seminar for the semester. It's a darn shame, because that class was the light of my school week. Anyway, I'm really excited to see a final exam with the phrases "Wes Craven" and "re-animated corpses" on it, so there's a silver lining.

This is the last set of mini-reviews for my class (I have two more big reviews coming - I've been a little backed up due to finals and the fact that I had a fifteen page script due today that I began yesterday) and as we drew closer and closer to my revered decade of the 80's, the more exciting everything got.

Hold onto your butts.

Village of the Damned

Year: 1960

Director: Wolf Rilla

Cast: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A massively successful British import, Village of the Damned is a slow boil, but is a lot more fun than the leaden horror fare the country cranked out for the entirety of the 50's. From German director Wolf Rilla (whose name sounds like it could be a SyFy Original movie), this tale based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos is creative and enthralling.

One day, every single person within the town lines of Midwich falls unconscious for several hours. When they wake up, every single woman of appropriate age is bearing a child. These children grow quickly and their blonde hair and glowing eyes start to freak out the inhabitants. After a rash of mysterious incidents their parents must discover a way to save themselves while struggling with the idea of fighting their own offspring.

It's really a fascinating premise and although it's only explored in a genteel English manner, it still has the means to frighten despite the now supremely outdated glowing eye effects. Even though it's clearly a negative superimposed on a still frame, those moments remain spine tingling to this day. Perhaps not  film to recommend to most of the MTV generation, but any fan of classic horror could do worse.

Rating: 7/10

The Howling

Year: 1981

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The first film screened during "Werewolf Week," The Howling was a film I was looking forward to greatly. My excitement was entirely predicated on that it was mentioned in one line in Scream, but it was genuine nonetheless. You can imagine my disappointment when it was really kind of terrible, and not even in the fun way.

Although my professor insists that The Howling is a horror comedy, I was hard-pressed to find a chuckle anywhere except the feeble wolf puns in the background (Somebody eats a can of Wolf chili. A man is reading "Howl.") 

The opening scene is quite nice, in which an intrepid reporter (Dee Wallace) is accosted by a werewolf in the red light district. It was interesting to see a werewolf scene set smack dab in the middle of urban America as opposed to some creepy far-off woodlands. 

Of course, after this scene, Wallace is immediately transported to some creepy far-off woodlands and my rapport with the film is immediately lost. 

The film does have some interesting things to say about werewolfism as a metaphor for hedonism and exploring your base animalistic instincts but it is weighed down by highly dubious (and inconsistent) alterations to the classic werewolf mythology, a screechy protagonist, and an early transformation sequence in which some VFX artist clearly just drew a wolf onto the frame.

Although I did like the ending. [Dee Wallace gets shot in the face.]

Rating: 4/10

An American Werewolf in London

Year: 1981

Director: John Landis

Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Joe Belcher

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Now this is more like it. A violent werewolf movie influenced by A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court directed by the guy who did Animal House that opens to the strains of "Bad Moon Rising?" Already an infinitely better film than The Howling.

David (David Naughton), our young (hot) protagonist has his vacation in England hampered by a wolf attack on the moors that leaves his friend Jack (Griffin Dunne) dead and him in a coma for several weeks in a London hospital with a nasty bite on his arm. 

When he is visited by the mauled ghost of his dead friend (complete with flapping jaw skin every time he opens his mouth - brilliantly disgusting), he learns that he is to become a werewolf and that if he doesn't die and end the curse, all werewolf victims are doomed to be trapped in Limbo for all eternity.

It's heavy stuff, but the film is hilarious. A pretty young nurse (Jenny Agutter) takes David home and they do it. A lot. This is a patient that every doctor in London is convinced is a mental case that this young nurse took home without telling anyone. But hey, there's no closed door in the world that beauty can't open.

One great werewolf transformation scene later, David is on the rampage across central London, making good on the film's title. For a lot of films that claim to take place in a major city (cough cough Jason Takes Manhattan), the city scenes feel brief and unsatisfying but David's mayhem in Piccadilly Circus is very worth it.

The film really is quite hilarious, my favorite part being the scene in the porn theater where Jack and his ghost friends suggest suicide techniques while the silliest sexy film in the history of cinema plays out in front of them. And though the ending disappointed many of my classmates, it is deliciously (and very darkly) funny and I honestly don't know what they were expecting.

Rating: 8/10

From Beyond

Year: 1986

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The first film in our double feature screening was Re-Animator, a fun cult classic that I have previously reviewed. From Beyond, another H. P. Lovecraft-based film from the same director, producer, and returning cast members Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs seemed like it would be in the same vein, with silly over-the-top gore and pure camp splashed across the walls.

We did indeed get a silly, campy B-movie with some outdated effects, but one that was filled to the brim with flesh-twisting Lovecraftian horrors. Among the staff of the large make-up department was gore legend John Carl Buechler (who also directed my favorite Friday the 13th film, Part VII: The New Blood) and his incredible influence is truly felt.

I was nailed to my seat, looking up at the screen with a mixture of awe and abject horror. A Lovecraftian nightmare of incredible proportions, From Beyond tells the story of a machine that resonates at a frequency that stimulates the pineal gland in the brain, allowing those in its vicinity a sixth sense - the power to see into an alternate dimension that coexists with our own and is filled with bizarre monsters.

The only problem is that when the machine is on, they can see us, too.

Young scientist Jeffrey Combs and psychologist Barbara Crampton are investigating the effects of this machine and are drawn into a psychosexual nightmare of epic proportions, accompanied by Dawn of the Dead veteran Ken Foree.

A perfect mix of campy humor and gore and some truly terrifying and batsh!t insane effects pieces sent From Beyond into the stratosphere and I really can't recommend it enough. If you have one shot to explain to somebody the bizarre excesses of 80's horror, this film vies with John Carpenter's The Thing for the title of being that one film you should show to them.

Wow.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1313

The Hills Are Alive

Year: 1977

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Robert Houston, Dee Wallace, Michael Berryman

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Wes Craven's second official film (he directed an incestual exploitation film called The Fireworks Woman under the pseudonym Abe Snake in 1975) after The Last House on the Left in 1972, The Hills Have Eyes had a lot to live up to? Would it be just as brutal and shocking as Last House? (No.) Would it have the same level of intellectual subtext? (It tried, but no.) Would it cause as much of a stir? (Well, kind of.)

In all ways, The Hills Have Eyes is just slightly less than its big brother grindhouse flick. It ended up being a stepping stone to Craven's more palatable (and more ingenious) work, but at the time all that was obvious was that it merely couldn't recapture whatever grubby magic Last House had. It's still a charming 70's horror flick, but it's really not all that good when it comes down to it.

There aren't very many screenshots more exciting than this one.

When the Carter family's camper breaks down in the desert in the middle of nowhere on their way to a vacation in California, they are dismayed to find that they are being pursued by hungry cannibalistic mutants.

Although there are many members of the Carter clan, the only important one is the acrobatic son Bobby Carter (Robert Houston) who back handsprings his way into your heart with his blonde hair and the piercing blue eyes of a Siberian husky. Also Dee Wallace (E.T.'s mom) is there too.

Remember he had this haircut a full 17 years before Justin Bieber was even born.

After their dog, Beauty (Flora), runs off and is eviscerated by an unknown assailant, the Carters realize that something may be wrong. Things begin to get ugly (Geddit? Cuz Beauty is dead.) when the mutants kidnap their infant child and crucify their father, who they captured when he was learning their history from an old man in a gas station.

After having saved his life with the best suicide prevention line ever ("Get your stupid neck out of that belt, you jackass!"), he learned that the mutants were a result of nuclear testing in the area before one of them comes crashing through a window in the best and scariest shot of the movie.

All of this combined with the eerie playful voices in the darkness actually is pretty creepy, but the goodwill the first half of the film builds up slowly peters out and turns into a boring revenge flick. Although we will always have this baby's face to delight us.

Either she's being attacked by a bloodthirsty monstrosity or she just made a doody.

There's some halfhearted commentary on the nature of family relationships, economic downturn, and the folly of the military, but that is mostly forgone in favor of gruesome fight scenes that aren't really so gruesome five years down the line from Last House on the Left. 

The real star of the show here is Pluto (Michael Berryman), one of the mutant sons of the evil ringleader Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth). Berryman was born with Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia, an extremely rare disease that left him without sweat glands, hair, fingernails, or teeth. 

Rather than get depressed and hide himself away, he turned in an excellent creepy performance in a high profile horror flick (and has since appeared in over 90 films). Although it's perhaps a bit of a shame that he felt he was compelled to use his condition to scare people, he nevertheless became a staple of late 70's horror.

And is featured in every advertisement despite being the third least important villain. Go Pluto!

But despite two strong performances, The Hills Have Eyes is bland fare that fades almost immediately from memory. Its director, breakout stars, and 70's ambient vibe have kept it afloat all these years but out of all of Craven's oeuvre, this one is perhaps the least deserving of being fondly appreciated.

Before we wrap up here, what is it with audiences that they hate seeing dogs die? At least 5 humans get eviscerated in this film, but the only death to provoke any response is Beauty's. Is it because dogs are perceived as innocents, much like babies? This is my current theory.

Either that or we're all sociopaths.

TL;DR: The Hills Have Eyes starts off strong, but is weak tea compared to the Craven shocker that came before.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 757

Reviews In This Series

The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977)

The Hills Have Eyes Part II (Craven, 1985)