the hills have eyes (cinema history class)

Session: Halloween Month / Fallen Filmmakers, week 1
Movie: The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Directed by Wes Craven
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
After suffering car troubles in the middle of the desert, a family tries to figure out what to do. But an incestuous local family of freaks has plans for them. Hilarity ensues.

Background and Reaction:
The Hills Have Eyes joins the ranks of the films that leave me breathless. It's not about having excessive jump scares or a lot of gore. It's about building tension and slowly ratcheting it up for a full movie. There's a grittiness  to this film that just gets under your skin and keeps irritating.

Sean and I disagreed about the ending. I thought it ended at the perfect point. The emergency is over, but the family is still in the desert. It would have been anticlimactic to show them slowly make their way back to civilization. As the viewer I was willing to assume they somehow get back. Sean felt that the film should have gone there.

I was particularly proud of one call I got right -- I predicted that the plot would resolve with Ruby's maternal instincts kicking in and making her save the baby.

I also want to note that I loved the line, "Do you always try to stop trespassers by hanging yourself?"

Ratings:
Ethan: 9
Me: 10
Scott: 9.5
Sean: 3 out of 4
Dave: 9.5 - 9.6

Bechdel:
The Hills Have Eyes passes the Bechdel test.

Tangentially-Related Anecdote:
Back in 2012, on our family roadtrip, we enterred Death Valley National Park from the East. That was through the small part of the park that's in Nevada. We did this because that way would take us past a ghost town. I forget its name. But the dirt road into the park had the same desolate feel as the dirt road in the beginning of this movie. I remember constantly wondering if I had gotten us lost in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately that was before I saw this movie.