"You come out here and stick your life in my face! PTHOO! Stick your fingers in my pie!... I'll eat the heart of your stinkin' memory. I'll eat the brains of your kids' kids!""

I've learned a few things from my time hanging around America these past few years: Americans treasure their freedom, and if nothing else, they are a proud people -- so proud that you can't tell them a damn thing. If you try to offer helpful suggestions, like, "Vaccinate your children," or, "It will take some getting used to, but the metric system really is easier," or even, "If you drive down that road your whole family will be raped and murdered by radioactive cannibal hillbillies," they'll tell you where you can stick your suggestions and wave a "Don't Tread On Me" flag at you.

It reminds me of this movie, where a family on vacation gets stuck in the Arizona desert, in a mostly uninhabited stretch of apocalyptic waste where the Air Force has been trying out new bombs, because Dad refused to follow the directions the man at the gas station gave him to get back on the Interstate.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, not to be confused with the 2006 remake.

I'm not here to kick sand on the remake, but the original feels so much more visceral. It came out a few years after Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a year before John Carpenter's Halloween. Craven, along with producer Sean Cunningham had already left a mark on the horror genre with The Last House on the Left, but had not yet made himself a household name with A Nightmare on Elm Street,  so the horror tropes we view as cliches today were still fresh. The grain of the film itself bestows it with a literal, visual grittiness rarely seen since, and while the remake reaped the benefits of the massive leaps in makeup F/X over almost three decades, no prosthetic makeup appliance in the world can make someone as convincingly ugly as Michael Berryman naturally is with his weird, pointy, shaved head.

Berryman plays Pluto, one of four brothers in a family of outcasts who've been surviving in the wasteland on whatever they could find, steal or kill. Their patriarch is Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth), who'd been left for dead in the desert by his own father (John Steadman) when he was a boy. The family's food supply is running out when a station wagon full of fresh suburbanites breaks down in the middle of their turf. The mutant people terrorize the city folk in an extravaganza of pillage, rape, canicide, and flaming cactus crucifixion. They even kidnap the baby so they can eat it.

Russ Grieve delivers a convincing performance as Big Bob Carter, the archetype asshole dad. Virginia Vincent also stands out in her portrayal of Ethel Carter, the sweet, clueless mom who wishes everyone would watch their language. Don Peake's excellent score keeps the tension bubbling throughout.

The Hills Have Eyes is a classic and it streams on Shudder and YouTube.