'The Hills Have Eyes' (1977) - High-Def Digest Review

[Attebery]

E has reviewed Wes Craven's 'The Hills Have Eyes.' He says this low budget film is still an entertainingly stylish picture about a deranged family of cannibals. This Blu-ray features a pretty good video transfer (except for one 15 minute long white dot!), appreciably improved audio, and a few extras. Worth a look.

Full review here:
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/5368/hills_eyes_77.html

[zombiefan514]

that should be a bonus disc or something. love the original

[cooltobeyou]

This movie is a classic, but I thought the transfer for this was horrid. When that white dot popped up on the screen, I seriously thought my T.V. screen was on the fritz. I thought it had a dead pixel or something. It was so annoying!

[eNoize]

LOL, I actually thought the same thing. I even paused the movie and wiped the lens on the projector just to be sure, and the damn thing still remained. I later checked it on two other displays, and the dot was there.

I wouldn't call it horrid, but yeah, it was pretty bad and terribly distracting.

[cooltobeyou]

LOL, I actually thought the same thing. I even paused the movie and wiped the lens on the projector just to be sure, and the damn thing still remained. I later checked it on two other displays, and the dot was there.

I wouldn't call it horrid, but yeah, it was pretty bad and terribly distracting.

hahah...yeah, I was very relieved to find out it was the transfer and NOT my T.V. screen. I was totally freaking out for a bit. lol.

Also, to be fair to the movie's transfer, this was the first time I've ever seen the movie. So maybe it's never looked very good. I'm assuming it was probably a very low budget film, and this is as good as they could make it look....

Still, when you have companies like Criterion though, who advertise in their booklets that they have "removed thousands of instances of dirt and scratches" to create a pristine transfer, it makes you wonder how a movie like "The Hills Have Eyes" could have looked even better, if a company that really cared about it would put the money behind it to make it look good.

[eNoize]

Oh, yeah, 'HHE' is very, very low-budget and shot on Super 16. Can't realistically expect greatness in PQ department, even in the hands of Criterion. This is the best the movie's ever looked (except for that stupid white dot!) and likely the best it ever can. I can understand someone watching it for the first time and discovering the BD image doesn't compare to other films of the same period.

[Adam Tyner]

This movie is a classic, but I thought the transfer for this was horrid.

By most accounts, this Blu-ray disc is a blatant upconversion and not genuine HD at all.

The screenshots at http://www.kentaiblog.com/2011/08/hills-have-lies.html , if they're accurate, seem impossible to interpret any other way.

There are a number of other super-low-budget 16mm films from the same general time period on Blu-ray right now -- Basket Case, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Evil Dead, for instance -- and they're all worlds removed from this.