and the Road Runner. Dread Central's Jon Condit opined that The Hills Have Eyes is not one of Craven's best films. In Empire, Kim Newman gave the film a three out of five star rating, saying, "Decades on The Hills Have Eyes no longer seems quite as breathlessly swift as it did." A critic for IndieWire dismissed the film as middling. Accolades At the 1977 Sitges Film Festival, The Hills Have Eyes won the Critic's Award. Home media The Hills Have Eyes was released on VHS in July 1981. It was released for the first time on DVD by Lionsgate Home Entertainment on September 23, 2003 as a two-disc special edition. On September 29 that same year, it was released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Anchor Bay would release the film again in 2006. The film made its Blu-ray debut on September 6, 2011 by Image Entertainment, who also released the film on DVD that same day. In 2013, Anchor Bay released the film on Blu-ray as a "Double feature" with Re-Animator (1985) and on DVD as part of a four disc set which also includes Re-Animator, Sleepwalkers (1992), and Darkness Falls (2003). The film had its Canadian release on both DVD and Blu-ray by E1 Entertainment on January 10, 2013. The film was later released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video on October 11, 2016 and again on January 30, 2018. Analysis Genre In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover characterizes The Hills Have Eyes as a rape and revenge film. Steven Jay Schneider classifies the film as a hybrid horror film, road movie, "siege film" and Western. Christopher Sharrett of Film Quarterly sees the film as more akin to an Anti-Western. Moral themes According to Steven Jay Schneider in Senses of Cinema, the sequence where Big Bob is crucified symbolizes "utter repudiation of" Judeo-Christian ethics. Schneider also views everyone in the film as guilty in some way. Slant Magazine Ed Gonzales characterized the film as "morally inconsequential," commenting that with the film's ending "Craven seemingly believes he's saying something about our instinctual need to kill for pleasure, but this philosophy doesn't hold water considering the context of [Doug's] situation....It's a cut-and-dry [sic] case of life-or-death self-defense." In Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, John Kenneth Muir writes that the film is not saying that the Carter family are worse than their enemies, as the cannibal clan commits violent acts