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It would seem as if Wes Craven didn’t have any downtime back in the 1980s. If he wasn’t actively making a movie, then he was writing the script for his next one. And if Craven’s work wasn’t found on the big screen, there was a good chance he had briefly pivoted to the small screen. Yet it was that waiting period for A Nightmare on Elm Street that led to Craven agreeing to make The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Getting financing for Elm Street was proving to be a hassle, and plans for a Craven-helmed adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic had also fallen through at Universal. So, in an effort to stay busy, and knowing the project would be funded from the get-go, Craven began shooting what many now consider to be his worst movie.

Success means sequels in the movie biz.

Kane Hodder, the icon responsible for giving life to Friday the 13th's slasher killer Jason Voorhees on numerous occasions, has revealed again that he almost played yet another very important character in horror cinema. Hodder is no stranger to the horror game outside the Friday the 13th franchise, having played characters such as Victor Crowley in the Hatchet film series, as well as Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame during stunt work. However, he has confirmed once again what he has addressed in the past: Hodder almost gave life to none other than A Nightmare on Elm Street''s Freddy Krueger.

As reported by Bloody Disgusting, Hodder was on the podcast Talks From the Crypt, where he spoke about his long career in horror. Hodder's early career was in stunt work, and during a demonstration that went horribly wrong, Hodder was left with burns all over his body. However,...

The year was 1983. Kane Hodder was stunt doubling for John Bloom as The Reaper in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II. It was one year before Craven would alter the course of horror history with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Craven had no idea that Hodder was about to change horror history in his own right, taking over the role of Jason Voorhees just five years later in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. He also had no idea that his latest creation was going to become a icon, but he at least had high hopes for the demonic Freddy Krueger.

Chatting with the video podcast Talks from the Crypt, Kane Hodder reveals in a new interview that Craven actually discussed his next movie with him while on set of Hills Have Eyes Part II. And it sounds like he could’ve even been...

Once upon a time, the most popular monsters of filmdom were linked to certain actors. Though other individuals would play these roles over time, ask any movie buff to name the performers best known for portraying Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, and they'll fire back with, respectively, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Karloff again, and Lon Chaney Jr. But while these roles were spoken for in the public's consciousness, one of these actors was famous, at least among seriously committed horror fans, for having played all four of Universal's marquee monsters -- and that actor was Chaney Jr.

Nearly 40 years after these fearsome characters' heydays, a new batch of beasts sprung up to terrify audiences the world over. These were the slashers, the most prominent being Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, and Freddy Krueger. Combined, these characters have appeared in, to date, 42 movies. Yet while these murderous...

I’d say we all have to acknowledge certain directors in the horror genre as undisputedly great. You can rank them however you like but there’s really no argument to be made against Wes, George, John, and Tobe leaving indelible marks on the genre we all love. So much so in fact that I didn’t even have to use their last names for you to know exactly who I’m referring to. While Carpenter is my favorite and I believe his run of quality is better than any of the others listed, Craven has more all-time classics. I’d say Craven has more stinkers too, but I think it’s that disparity that makes stuff like today’s film fall under the radar. While Deadly Friend isn’t as good as The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs, or Red Eye, it’s certainly better than stuff like Swamp Thing,...

There are a surprising number of horror movies that beat the odds by outdoing themselves at the box office. Some horror films are guaranteed to be huge successes so much so that even the remakes of these horror films become successful. The Conjuring had a $20 million budget and a large promotional campaign leading up to its release, while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had a low budget, but promoting it as a true story anticipated higher box office expectations.

There are also horror movies that were expected to fail abysmally and did, such as The Hills Have Eyes Part II, which closed production early because of the lack of funds. When the film was released, it was only for a short time in select theaters. However, the horror movies that outperformed the box office expectations are perhaps the most satisfying. These films are often low-budget movies that strike gold at the box office,...

Wes Craven's 1977 film "The Hills Have Eyes," like Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" before it, features a vanload of city folks who find themselves waylaid in a forgotten corner of the American wasteland. In Craven's film, the wasteland is not rural Texas, but the irradiated deserts of Nevada. The protagonists (Dee Wallace is among them) are beset by the brood of the sadistic Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth), including Mars (Lance Gordon), Mercury (Arthur King), and Pluto (Michael Berryman). Years ago, Jupiter moved into the hills with his wife (Cordy Clark) and raised their children to attack and cannibalize passers-through in order to survive. "The Hills Have Eyes" is raw and brutal, but possessed of a winking sense of humor that horror fans will appreciate.

The original film only cost about $700,000 to make (although the actual budget isn't very well recorded), yet it went on to make over $25 million,...

After his 1972 debut "The Last House on the Left," Wes Craven wanted to break away from the horror genre. But try as he might, Craven could not find anyone to finance a non-horror project. Producers wanted more thrills and chills from the filmmaker, and so Craven relented. The result was 1977's "The Hills Have Eyes," a nasty little movie in which a group of cannibals torments a suburban family in the Nevada desert. The film was a box office hit and spawned a sequel, a remake, and a sequel to the remake. Let's take a look at the franchise as we rank "The Hills Have Eyes" movies from worst to best.

Read more: The 15 Best Final Girls In Horror Movies Ranked

The Hills Have Eyes Part II

Wes Craven shot about two-thirds of "The Hills Have Eyes Part II" before the studio pulled the plug due to budget reasons. Then...

The episode of Best Horror Movie You Never Saw covering The Last Showing was Written by Cody Hamman, Edited by Juan Jimenez, Narrated by Kier Gomes, Produced by John Fallon and Tyler Nichols, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.

Robert Englund terrorizing people throughout the night isn’t a rare sight to see. As the star of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, he has been in some of the most popular horror movies ever made. His performance made the dream-stalking Freddy Krueger a genre icon. But he has around one hundred and fifty screen credits where he didn’t play Freddy. With that much output, it’s not surprising that the occasional project slips completely under the radar. Today, we’re going to shine the spotlight on one of those projects. A film where Englund plays a weaselly projectionist who traps Finn Jones in a movie theatre overnight. It...

Early in Wes Craven's 1984 horror film "A Nightmare on Elm Street," the character of Tina (Amanda Wyss) has a violent dream about the demonic, blade-handed Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Freddy has been stalking the dreams of all the neighborhood teens, and the nightmares are so vivid that they fear for their lives. Tina dreams that Freddy is chasing her down an alley, that he cuts off his own fingers and feels nothing, and that he can teleport into her bedroom. 

In one of the film's more notorious scenes, Tina is attacked and sliced up by Freddy who, defying gravity, drags her onto the wall of her bedroom and up onto the ceiling as she bleeds to death. Once Tina has perished, her body falls from the ceiling onto her bed, landing in a pool of blood, splattering the walls and the face of her poor helpless boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri...

Cinema fans have been familiar with Michael Berryman for decades. He made his first screen appearance in the 1975 film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, following that up with a role in the Best Picture winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Next up was his most iconic role, that of the desert-dwelling cannibal Pluto in Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes, a role he reprised in the messy 1984 sequel The Hills Have Eyes Part II. He has gone on to rack up over one hundred more credits, including roles in films like Deadly Blessing, Invitation to Hell, Cut and Run, Weird Science, My Science Project, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, The Guyver, Beastmaster 2, Wizards of the Demon Sword, Teenage Exorcist, The Devil’s Rejects, Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield, The Haunted Casino, The Lords of Salem, and Death House.

Richard Bracken, a four-time Emmy-nominated film editor with credits including Ironside, Columbo, Rich Man, Poor Man and three Wes Craven movies, has died. He was 90.

Bracken died Thursday of kidney failure in Chatsworth, California, his daughter Kathleen Bracken said.

Bracken worked for Oscar-nominated producer Ross Hunter on the films The Thrill of It All (1963) and Madame X (1966); on the Arthur Hailey 1976 miniseries The Moneychangers; and on telefilms including 1978’s A Family Upside Down, starring Helen Hayes and Fred Astaire.

He also collaborated with director Wes Craven on Deadly Blessing (1981), Swamp Thing (1982) and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984).

Bracken received ...

Richard Bracken, a four-time Emmy-nominated film editor with credits including Ironside, Columbo, Rich Man, Poor Man and three Wes Craven movies, has died. He was 90.

Bracken died Thursday of kidney failure in Chatsworth, California, his daughter Kathleen Bracken said.

Bracken worked for Oscar-nominated producer Ross Hunter on the films The Thrill of It All (1963) and Madame X (1966); on the Arthur Hailey 1976 miniseries The Moneychangers; and on telefilms including 1978’s A Family Upside Down, starring Helen Hayes and Fred Astaire.

He also collaborated with director Wes Craven on Deadly Blessing (1981), Swamp Thing (1982) and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984).

Bracken received ...

For the final week of home media releases in September, genre fans have a lot to get excited over, as we have a multitude of titles coming our way on Tuesday. In terms of recent releases, the Child’s Play remake will hit multiple formats, and both the Jacob’s Ladder remake and the possession thriller Luz (which is Incredible) are heading to DVD as well. As far as classic horror titles being resurrected this week, Scream Factory is keeping busy with both Fear No Evil (1981) and John Carpenter’s Vampires, and Arrow Video has put together some special edition releases for The Hills Have Eyes Part 2, In the Aftermath, as well as both Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (both of which has previously been released by Arrow as part of their Scarlet Box set).

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Vinegar Syndrome is showing some love to Mountaintop Motel Massacre,...

Amazon has released its list of every new title coming to its Prime Video streaming service in August. New additions include “Free Meek,” which covers rapper Meek Mill’s 2017 arrest for probation violations, which sparked outrage. The Amazon Prime original series will be released on Aug. 9 and will re-investigate his original case and explore allegations of police corruption.

A trio of new comedy specials are coming in August as well. “Jim Gaffigan: Quality Time,” his seventh comedy special, arrives Aug. 16. Here, the four-time Grammy-nominated comedian talks about how he doesn’t understand why we aren’t more honest about the reasons we don’t want to attend events.

“Alice Wetterlund: My Mama is a Human and So Am I,” is out on Aug. 23, features comedian and actor Alice Wetterlund as she reveals her personal struggles with peeping toms, cat-rearing, alcoholism and the secret alien conspiracy behind new country music in her breakout comedy special.

Following the premiere of Carnival Row on Amazon Prime, the streaming service will continue to give viewers action-packed, eerie features to watch once they finish the new show. All of the following suspenseful flicks are slated to hit the platform on August 31st:

Poltergeist II: The Other Side Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II The 2014 adaptation of Godzilla Hellboy II: The Golden Army A Cadaver Christmas I, Frankenstein The Bog Creatures The Uninvited

While none of these particular movies are hailed as classics in their respective genres, there’s still a lot to like about each. Curious film buffs may find that there are even a few diamonds in the rough on this list. All of these features are designed to provide some similar entertainment after people binge-watch Carnival Row. At least, that’s what Amazon Prime is hoping for.

The new neo-noir series starring Cara Delevingne...

Looking for some fun in the sun? Then you Need to experience (or revisit) the wackiness that is Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II. It’s worth it for the dog flashback alone! Michael Berryman, Robert Houston, David Nichols,… Continue Reading →

The post DC’s Shudder Pick of the Weekend – The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 appeared first on Dread Central.

File this one under a spectacularly bad great time! The sequel to the Wes Craven classic The Hills Have Eyes is one of those movies that I cannot help but love, if only for the absurdity of it all, and… Continue Reading →

The post DC’s Shudder Pick of the Weekend – The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1984) appeared first on Dread Central.

Legendary horror movie director Wes Craven, who is responsible for classics such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, passed away earlier today at the age of 76, after battling brain cancer. The filmmaker made his mark with his first film, 1972's The Last House on the Left, and continued to be a driving force in the genre ever since. The filmmaker is survived by his third wife, producer Iya Labunka, sister Carol Buhrow, son Jonathan Craven, daughter Jessica Craven, stepdaughter Nina Tarnawksy and three grandchildren.

Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Caroline (Miller) and Paul Eugene Craven, raised by a strict baptist family. He earned his undergraduate degree in English and Psychology from Wheaton University in Illinois, and earned his Masters in Philosophy and Writing from Johns Hopkins University. After college, he was briefly a humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York.

The line-up for this year's Film4 FrightFest in London has just been announced – and boy, is it a doozy! Sporting a record-breaking 38 UK/European premieres and 11 world premieres, this August is going to be an exciting time in the genre calendar.

Check it all out right here, including lots of new images!

This year Film4 FrightFest will be moving from its previous home at Leicester Square's Empire Cinema to the nearby Vue Cinema (also on Leicester Square), prompting an ingenious reshuffle of the screening arrangements.

All main screen films will be presented at different times across three different screens, with two extra screens reserved for single-slot screenings of the various films hitting this year's Discovery Screens.

Here's the full list of goodies:

Main Screens (5, 6, 7)

Thursday Aug 21

Opening Night Film - The Guest (UK Premiere)

Director: Adam Wingard. Cast: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Brendan Meyer, Sheila Kelley, Leland Orser. USA 2014. 99 mins.

Film4 FrightFest 2014, returning for its 15th year, unveils its biggest line-up ever. From Thurs 21 August to Monday 25 August, the UK’s leading event for genre fans will be at the Vue West End, Leicester Square, to present sixty-four films plus twenty shorts across five screens. There are sixteen countries representing five continents with a record-breaking thirty-eight UK or European premieres and eleven world premieres.

Are you ready for a monstrous and memorable mayhem of killer claws, cannibalism, cult classics, murderous musicals, chiller thrillers, graphic novel action and sick celluloid masterpieces? Then prepare yourself for the biggest, strongest and most eclectic must-see programme in Film4 FrightFest’s history.

From the opening night turbo-driven thrill-ride The Guest to the UK premiere of the closing night mesmeric sci-fi fantasy The Signal, FrightFest has netted the latest works from genre big-hitters such as Eli Roth (The Green Inferno), Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins (Show...

Welcome to the first in a new feature here on Nerdly where we take a look at some of the weeks new releases in smaller, more succinct capsule reviews with a rating to let you know whether to Rent, Buy, or wait for Netflix and/or other streaming services…

Demon Legacy

Stars: Anna Maria Demara, Kati Sharp, Grant Alan, Nancy McCrumb, Cortney Palm | Written by Tracy Morse | Directed by Rand Vossler

In a remote mountain lodge, ­ five college friends are spending time together to help one of them get over a break up. After a late night drunken party the friends decide to play with a Ouija board, with terrible consequences. An unholy evil is unleashed and the friends must battle evil and each other, as the lines between reality and imagination blur the struggle to save them begins.

Demon Legacy has one hell of a pedigree: a first-time feature from director Rand Vossler who,...

Chicago – It is a horror movie image that is immediately recognizable. Michael Berryman portrayed “Pluto” in Wes Craven’s renown 1977 film, “The Hills Have Eyes,” and even the poster image evokes a memory of his distinctive look. Berryman made an appearance last November at the Days of the Dead Horror Convention in Chicagoland.

Part of Berryman’s unique look is due to rare genetic disorder he was born with called Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia, which prevents the development of fingernails, teeth and sweat glands. He got his start in the movies in 1975 with “Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Two years later he appeared in Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes” and solidified his niche in cinema history. Over the years, he has appeared in “The Hills Have Eyes Part II” (1984), “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986), “Evil Spirits” (1990), “Spy Hard” (1996) and “The...

Interviewed by Michael Juvinall, More Horror.com

Michael Berryman is a name that you might not be familiar with, but believe me; horror fans will definitely know his face. Berryman has such a distinctive appearance due to a genetic condition at birth that prevents him from growing hair, fingernails, sweat glands, or teeth. Whereas some people might call his condition a handicap, Berryman has turned his physical appearance into a career playing bad guys, mutants, monsters, and all sorts of evil characters.

Berryman appeared in the Oscar winning film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), but is best known for his role as “Pluto” in Wes Craven’s seminal film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and the sequel The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1984). Berryman has appeared in over 60 films and a career that has spanned almost 40 years as an actor. Coming up in 2013, Berryman has no less than eight...

Big congrats to the St. Louis-based filmmakers over at Crunchy Cool Films. They’ve scored a major casting coup by securing three A-list horror villains for their upcoming shocker The Bloodfest Club which starts filming in our town soon. Horror vets Bill Moseley, Michael Berryman, and William Forsythe have all signed on for roles in the film!

Bloodfest Club will be the second film from the writing team of Oscar Madrid and Jim Ousley. Their first, Hooch & Daddy-O (2005), was an award-winning mock documentary (available on Netflix). about a fictional 80′s cop show. Bloodfest Club will mark the directorial debut of Madrid and stars writer Ousley as Sonny Kane, a slow-witted, Chuck Norris-obsessed janitor at a High School that takes on a bloodthirsty alien roaming the hallways killing students.

Moseley will star as Dr. Colin Dante, the sinister history professor in search of lost artifacts on campus. Berryman will play Sensei Noddy Donigan,...

Image Entertainment will be releasing a new Blu-ray and DVD edition of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes and we have all of the release information, including bonus features and cover art.

“Chatsworth, CA – Image Entertainment proudly announces the high-definition debut of a genuine cult gem with the September 6th Blu-ray™ premiere of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror classic The Hills Have Eyes. Featuring digitally restored 1080p video, DTS-es 6.1 Master Audio sound, and over three hours of bonus features including audio commentary by writer/director Craven, retrospective featurettes on the film and the director, an alternate ending, U.S. and international trailers & spots, photo galleries, storyboards and more! A standard DVD edition, with commentary, will also be available. Srp is a very tasty $17.97 for the Blu-ray™ and $9.98 for the DVD.

Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Shocker, Scream) gave 70’s filmgoers a whole new definition of disturbing with The Hills Have Eyes,...

We've been waiting patiently for the full specs on this one to come in, and now that they're here, we couldn't be happier. If only someone would give us a Blu-ray of the second flick so we can see the dog's flashback in glorious 1080p!

From the Press Release

Image Entertainment proudly announces the high-definition debut of a genuine cult gem with the September 6th Blu-ray™ premiere of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror classic The Hills Have Eyes. Featuring digitally restored 1080p video, DTS-es 6.1 Master Audio sound, and over three hours of bonus features including audio commentary by writer/director Craven, retrospective featurettes on the film and the director, an alternate ending, U.S. and international trailers & spots, photo galleries, storyboards and more! A standard DVD edition, with commentary, will also be available. Srp is a very tasty $17.97 for the Blu-ray™ and $9.98 for the DVD.

Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street,...

For a while, successful horror looked to be a thing of the past. With the close of the 1980s it seemed that audience fatigue had set in regarding reigning franchises. 1989 saw minimal box office returns for the Friday the 13th, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, indicating that audiences might’ve had enough of these recurring bogeymen. Original horror wasn’t faring much better, either, with the majority of ‘successful’ movies pulling in around $20-$30 million in final grosses. Budgets hadn’t yet inflated, so these returns were often respectable – although hardly the stuff of blockbusters. Hollywood pedigree stuff like The Silence of the Lambs, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview with the Vampire made bigger bank, but on larger budgets and with considerably more advertising money backing them.

The studios behind these successful horrors were often desperate to emphasize the non-horrific aspects of these productions, often times...

It’s always difficult to predict what you’re going to get from director Wes Craven. Sometimes it’s a genre classic like The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream; exceptional scare films that spawned a slew of copycats. On other occasions, Craven produces complete misfires in the form of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, Deadly Friend or his latest failure, My Soul to Take.

After brutally murdering his wife, a schizophrenic killer known as the Riverton Ripper is captured by authorities, but he disappears after the ambulance transferring him from the crime scene crashes. Some sixteen years later to the day, a group of seven teenagers celebrate their birthday, telling tales of the slayer by the wreckage of that very accident — which has never been removed. When the youngsters begin to die violently, Bug (Max Thieriot), a bullied, ornithology-obsessed teen soon becomes the center of audience suspicion.

Filed under: Reviews, Horror, Cinematical

'My Soul To Take,' the latest from seasoned horror director Wes Craven, is a truly fascinating film. In order to appreciate what is fascinating about it, however, one must approach the film the same way they would the body of a frog or snake that has been mutated by toxic waste and preserved under glass as a painful reminder of what can happen when known polluters are allowed to continue about their business unsupervised. It has all of the right body parts to be a movie, but it has too many of them and they all unify together in ways that are both baffling and impossible for survival. And like a frog with seven legs and two heads, it is simultaneously saddening, horrifying, and totally engrossing to watch 'My Soul To Take' go about its fleeting life blissfully unaware that it's an abomination.

House of 1000 Corpses, Dogtown, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, Capricorn One, Nashville, The Day of the Locust, The Great Gatsby, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, The Best Years of Our Lives, Weird Science, The Hills Have Eyes, The Hills Have Eyes Part 2, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and From Russia With Love. These are just some of the movies and television shows the cast of Evil Spirits have been in prior to taking on this 1990 release. This amazingly talented cast is set adrift in a story that never manages to live up to its potential – either for fear or for camp.

Karen Black runs a boarding house where her roomers sign over all their government checks – they are all on disability or Social Security and she cashes them gleefully and pockets the money. Once a...