30 Day Horror Challenge-Day 26: An aggravatingly incompetent protagonist.

For the next 30 days (or whenever I stop being lazy and finish it), I will be giving my fingers short bursts of exercise by completing the 30 Day Horror Challenge, found here. Hopefully it will give you a bit of insight into what horror is for me. Don't forget to check back every day for a new installment.

Day 26: An aggravatingly incompetent protagonist.

Bobby, the brother in Wes Craven's original The Hills Have Eyes, takes the award for most aggravatingly incompetent protagonist. Played by Robert Houston, Bobby is the brother of the family whose car is sabotaged in the desert, miles away from any civilisation, and being hunted by a cannibalistic tribe. An important point of the film that Craven makes is that people don't communicate, which brings Bobby to perform his most annoying act; when one of the family dogs goes missing, he finds it disemboweled, yet he is too embarrassed to tell his family this, until later, when he awkwardly cock-blocks his brother-in-law to share the doggy secret. If he'd said it to them earlier on, they could have been prepared for something amiss about to happen, or else warned the family or the bad idea of splitting up. The cartwheeling bastard (yeah, he cartwheels) is pretty ineffective in a fight, shows himself useless with a gun, and seems to only make it so far thanks to his sister. In defense of him though, if he had been in any way competent, the Hills Have Eyes wouldn't have been nearly as classic a film as it is remembered as today.