Rating: C+
Dir: Wes Craven
Star: Martin Speer, Lance Gordon, Susan Lanier, Robert Houston
Bit of a shock to realize I’d never actually seen this. Its VHS sleeve, with Michael Berryman glowering from the cover, is pretty much engraved on my memory, but I never rented it, and had never caught up with it subsequently. I think my relatively low opinion of Craven maybe plays into it. I don’t like The Last House on the Left at all, and Scream would be well up my list of most over-rated horror movies. This doesn’t do much to change that opinion. It feels like he was trying to out-do The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, copying the family of lunatics, preying on city folk. But the level of thought involved seems not much more than, “We’ll have our cannibals eat… pets and babies!”
It’s competent enough, for what it is. The Carter family are driving from Cleveland to California, when an ill-advised detour and accident, leaves them stranded in the middle of the desert. It’s near an Air Force bombing range, but a bigger threat is the clan of inbred lunatics whose territory it is. When Mr. Carter, a retired cop, goes to seek help, he’s captured and set on fire, to draw the family away from their camper, allowing the locals to raid it for supplies and any babies carelessly left lying around. This results in the baby’s father, Doug (Speer) having to launch a rescue mission against Mars (Gordon) and the rest of his family.
I guess it is different from TCM, in that survival is not obtained by escape, but by confrontation. There’s nowhere to run here (indeed, one wonders what happens after the end credits. Those still alive remain stuck in the desert, with no way to raise help). The Carters need to become as equally savage as their attackers. If there’s a moral message here – rather than being just a quick bit of exploitation – it may be that everyone has unspeakable brutality in them, if pushed far enough. Also like TCM, its reputation for gore probably exceeds the reality. Most of the nastiness is implied, though Craven remained mum on exactly where they got the genuine dog corpse which was used.
No denying, the locals are a creepy bunch, led by Berryman. His look is largely natural, due to cranial synostosis, responsible for his elongated head, and hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, leaving him without hair or fingernails. He’s in it less than expected. I also hadn’t realized Dee Wallace has a supporting role here, one of her earliest features. But in general, these are functional performances, rather than effective ones. The dog, Beast, may be the smartest living thing in the movie. Then again, he’s already a murderer, having killed a poodle down in Miami. Just to watch him die, probably. The Carters laugh about this incident, suggesting the sociopathic tendencies they need to survive, may not be all that deeply buried. Shame the sequel – universally despised, not least by Craven himself – was not entirely about the further adventures of Beast. Homeward Bound becomes more of a threat.