Whitehead of The Spectator deemed the film's "predictable" plot an excuse for "scenes of ghastly carnage in the horror vein of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," opining that Craven "maintains the tension throughout and occasionally manages to relieve the horror with elements of the ridiculous." Whitehead stated that he "simply found [himself] looking away from the endless stabbings, gougings and burnings." Retrospective On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hills Have Eyes holds a 67% approval rating based on , with an average rating of 6.3/10. The consensus reads: "When it's not bludgeoning the viewer with its more off-putting, cruder elements, The Hills Have Eyes wields some clever storytelling and a sly sense of dark humor." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews". The film was included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, where Steven Jay Schneider said it "warrants consideration as one of the richest and most perfectly realized films of Craven's career". Fangoria listed the film as one of the thirteen greatest horror films of the 1970s while Film Journal International has cited The Hills Have Eyes as a classic grindhouse feature. The film was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills. TV Guide gave it a three out of four stars rating, saying that it is "exhilarating" to watch the Carters become more savage. Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman wrote that the film is more imaginative than horror films made by major studios. For the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego said that The Hills Have Eyes is the scariest movie he has ever seen, describing it and The Last House on the Left (1972) as "a turning point in horror... Suddenly, earlier horror—like the Universal classics (Frankenstein, etc.) and Roger Corman's Poe films—seemed like weak tea." Comparing The Hills Have Eyes to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting found the former superior and praised its "overwhelming" tension. Slant Magazines Eric Henderson called the film "effective" and praised its cast, particularly Robert Houston, whose performance is "more complex than your average male lead in a horror film." However, Henderson also deemed the film inferior to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and criticized the sequence where the Carters create booby traps for feeling like Looney Tunes cartoons about Wile E. Coyote