Wes Craven enjoys a cult reputation second only to George Romero's as a director of gruesome horror films that place ordinary everyday people into situations of the most ghastly terror. The Hills Have Eyes deals with an all-American family at the mercy of cannibal mutants. Trapped on a dead-end road in the middle of the Southern California desert, the Carter family is attacked by a second family of homicidal cretins, who terrorize the Carters for 24 hours in what one critic called “one of the most grisly explosions of murderous fury ever seen on the screen.” The final struggle takes on symbolic significance, with the killers representing all the unseen and unknown forces that threaten us all at one time or another; the survivors, on both sides, include the teenagers, one dog and a baby, on whose future depends the ultimate resolution - it would seem - of the age-old conflict between good and evil. Definitely not for the squeamish.