The Hills Have Eyes

The Carter family — a retired police detective, his wife, their adult children, a son-in-law, and a newborn baby — are driving cross-country through New Mexico when they stop at a remote gas station. The attendant is nervous and strange. He sends them down a desert back road as a shortcut. They take it. The road has been seeded with debris; their tires shred and the trailer comes to a stop miles from anything.

The desert was a nuclear test zone in the 1950s. Families who lived out there refused to evacuate and absorbed decades of fallout. Their descendants — severely mutated, territorial, feral — have been living in the hills ever since, surviving on anyone who passes through. They've been watching the Carters since the gas station.

Bob, the patriarch, and Doug, his son-in-law, split up to find help in opposite directions. Bob finds an abandoned mining town and is captured. The mutants crucify him on a burning Christmas tree as a signal beacon, a sick parody of the suburb they once were. Back at the trailer, the attack begins: Bob's wife and daughter are killed, the baby is taken, Brenda is assaulted.

Doug arms himself and goes into the hills alone to get his daughter back. He moves through the abandoned test town — preserved, grotesque, wrong — killing his way toward Catherine. Bobby and Brenda hold the trailer.

Doug finds his daughter and kills the mutant Lizard in the final confrontation. He walks out carrying Catherine. The camera pulls back to reveal another mutant watching from a ridge above. The hills are still watching.