Wes Craven produced the 1995 b-movie Mind Ripper, but the question of whether or not the film is The Hills Have Eyes III is surprisingly complicated. Following the success (and infamy) of his debut feature The Last House On The Left, director Wes Craven tried for years to mount a project that wasn’t horror. He eventually relented and made The Hills Have Eyes, where a family is stranded in the Mojave desert and has to fight off a clan of inbred cannibals. The movie was another hit for Craven and is still considered one of his best horror movies.

A cash-strapped Craven would return once again for The Hills Have Eyes Part II during the early 1980s, but the production ran out of money before it was finished. The director was later forced to finish it by using constant flashbacks to the original, which includes the famous dog flashback scene. In contrast to the 1977 original, the sequel is considered arguably Craven’s worst movie and the helmer himself essentially disowned it.

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The Hills Have Eyes later received a glossier remake in 2006, which Craven produced and Crawl helmer Alexandre Aja directed. The movie did well critically and financially, though the 2007 sequel, which was co-written by Craven and his son Jonathan, had a much weaker reception. The duo had previously worked together on 1995’s Mind Ripper, a HBO horror movie about a team of scientists being hunted in an underground desert bunker by a mutant named “Thor.” Before it became Mind Ripper, however, the project was originally The Hills Have Eyes III.

Outside of the desert setting and a main villain who feasts on humans – or their brains, in this specific case – Mind Ripper has no real connection to The Hills Have Eyes series. The movie does boast a surprisingly good cast, including Lance Henriksen, Natasha Gregson Wagner and it marked the feature film debut of one Giovanni Ribisi. That said, it’s also something of a drab, low-budget creature feature which future Hell On Wheels creator Joe Gayton did little to elevate as director.

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The project moved from being The Hills Have Eyes III to a standalone movie called The Outpost, but Mind Ripper was the title it settled on. That said, it was released in some territories as The Hills Have Eyes III, and in the years since its first release, it comes to be seen as either a spinoff or an unofficial entry in the franchise. A Code Red Blu-ray of the movie bore The Hills Have Eyes III title, with Mind Ripper being used as an alternate name. Basically, the movie started life as the third entry but despite being renamed during development, it sort of morphed back into being a part of the series anyway.

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Padraig Cotter
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It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

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He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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