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Carter Family
In General
An all-American family passing through the desert to visit California.
- Dysfunctional Family: Most of their screen time together is them bickering. Bob is domineering and arrogant, Ethel is scatterbrained, Brenda acts like a Bratty Teenage Daughter, and Lynne seems to be the Only Sane Woman.
- Foil: To the cannibals. While they are not exactly the ideal image of an all American family they come across as The Brady Bunch compared to the cannibals they meet.
Big Bob Carter
Played By: Russ Grieve
A bigoted former police officer who has recently retired due to his heart condition, and the patriarch of the Carter family.
- Asshole Victim: He's a bigoted Jerkass and rather emotionally abusive to his family, making him very unsympathetic. However, his death is horrible enough that it's hard not to pity him.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The Clan crucifies him and burns him alive.
- Death by Racism: He’s sexist, xenophobic, and everything in-between, and he winds up the first of the Carter family to die.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: On paper, Bob is the kind of hero common to action and exploitation films at the time; an experienced cop and father who is a conservative man of action clearly upset about his retirement. He’s also emotionally abusive to anyone he views as weak, has extremely outdated racist and sexist attitudes, and is extremely arrogant to the point of ignoring his own limitations, which results in his death.
- Decoy Protagonist: The film starts off focusing on him and setting him up as the hero, only for him to be the first of the Carters to die.
- Jerkass: He’s a bigoted jackass who belittles Ethel and Doug, railroads the family into going along with whatever he likes, refuses to take responsibility for his actions, and generally acts like a macho asshole.
- Logical Weakness: While he may be a veteran cop, his heart condition is very dangerous, and so, during his encounter with Papa Jupiter, Bob, despite having a gun, is defeated when Jupiter’s scare tactics and the stress of the situation cause him to have a heart attack.
- Never My Fault: He blames Ethel for getting them stranded in the desert, in spite of the fact he was the one who demanded they stop in the desert to see the abandoned silver mine in the first place, which no one else wanted to do.
- Noble Bigot with a Badge: Subverted. Bob's a former cop and a sexist, racist, and xenophobe, but he boasts of being a John Wayne-esque action hero. However, when Jupiter's clan makes their move, Bob fails miserably and winds up the first casualty.
- Papa Wolf: Tries to run to save his family after realizing his children are in danger, which leads to his heart attack.
Ethel Carter
Played By: Virginia Vincent
Big Bob’s religious, somewhat scatterbrained wife.
- Cloudcuckoolander: She can be pretty scatterbrained, and plays a part in getting the family lost because she simply doesn't know how to read a map.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: While not as bad as Bob’s death, she bleeds out slowly from a gunshot wound and starts hallucinating until she quietly dies.
- Heroic BSoD: After Big Bob is killed.
- Mama Bear: She leaps into action to whack Mars with a broom after discovering him kidnapping Katy. It gets her fatally wounded, but is still a pretty badass moment, regardless.
- Nice Girl: She’s a sweet old woman, albeit a bit oblivious to the world around her.
Doug Wood
Played By: Martin Speer
Lynne’s goofy, but loving husband.
- Classical Anti-Hero: Doug’s a nice enough guy, but he’s completely out of his depth, and fails to accomplish anything without the help of other, more competent people.
- Determinator: He steps up in a massive way in the second half of the film.
- Failure Hero: Doug fails to accomplish anything without outside help, and his “hope for the best and do nothing” attitude winds up getting Lynne and Ethel killed and the baby kidnapped. He gets better, though, and the resources he does scavenge manage to come in handy during the climax.
- Nice Guy: He's pretty sweet-tempered and goofy, and protective of his wife and sister-in-law.
- Papa Wolf: He's willing to do whatever it takes to rescue his daughter.
- Took a Level in Badass: He's well-liked by most of the family, but is considered somewhat bumbling and useless. After Lynne dies and Katy is kidnapped, he does whatever it takes to get revenge and get her back. He directs the Beast to kill Pluto and manages to rescue Katy with Ruby's help, bravely distracts Mars in order to help Ruby get Katy to safety, and fights and eventually kills him.
Lynne Wood
Played By: Dee Wallace
Doug’s wife and the eldest child.
- Only Sane Woman: Lynne comes off as the most grounded of the family, and she tries to serve as a mediator between Bob and Doug.
- Mama Bear: She attacks Mars when he tries to kidnap Katy, which winds up getting her shot dead.
Brenda Carter
Played By: Susan Lanier
Bob and Ethel’s bubbly, cheerful daughter.
- Action Girl: She doesn’t start out as one, but she winds up helping kill Papa Jupiter through a clever trap and some well-times swings of a fire axe.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Has shades of this, such as sparring with Bobby and complaining that they'll surely die after their car breaks down.
- Genki Girl: While not a Motor Mouth, she’s still very cheerful and energetic until she gets raped.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: A sweet girl with blonde hair.
- Heroic BSoD: After being raped by Mars, she goes into shock and freaks out whenever she thinks the Clan is near.
- Hysterical Woman: She spends the second half of the movie in between this and Catonia.
- The Load: Subverted. After being raped, she initially is reduced to screaming hysterically, but she comes up with a plan to kill Papa Jupiter, and when Papa Jupiter survives being blown up and attacks Bobby, she immediately attacks him with an axe.
- Sanity Slippage: She devolves into a barely functional Hysterical Woman by the end of the movie.
Bobby Carter
Played By: Robert Houston
The family's only son, an athletic and cocky young man who is charged with taking care of the family after the trailer breaks down.
- Deadpan Snarker: Just read his quote.
- The Load: Despite Big Bob tasking him with protecting the family, he isn't able to do much for the majority of the film, though he does step up after Lynne and Ethel die.
- The Stoic: He keeps his emotions under wraps, mainly due to Big Bob’s teachings.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Doesn't tell anyone about Beauty’s death so he wouldn’t scare the girls. He tries to tell Doug, who won't listen and insists that everything will be fine shortly once Bob gets back. Had he told anyone before he did, the Carters could have prepared for the mutants before the siege on the trailer and prevented the deaths of Lynne and Ethel.
- He's also tricked into revealing how helpless the survivors are after he thinks he's hailed the local law enforcement.
Katy Wood
Played By: Brenda Marinoff
Lynne and Doug’s infant daughter.
- The Cutie: She's just adorable and earns tons of adoration from the Carters. Ruby's attachment to her lead to her saving her life.
Beauty and Beast
The Carter family’s two pet German Shepherds.
- Action Pet: Beast, who is the single most useful member of the Carter family in the film, killing the most members of the Clan, stealing one of their walkie talkies and bringing it back to the trailer, and generally filling the Clan with fear whenever he shows up.
- Horrifying the Horror: The Clan is TERRIFIED of Beast, and nickname him “Devil Dog”.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Beauty is seemingly the more calm and gentle one (Blue) while Beast (Red) is MUCH more aggressive and survives BOTH movies.
The Clan
In General
In General
A Cannibal Clan of mutants and degenerates who live out in the desert, surviving off the land and looting travelers whenever food runs low.
- Ambiguously Human: Much more so than in the Remake, where they are each explicitly a Humanoid Abomination. It’s never outright confirmed but they seem to not have very normal genetics, and may even have superhuman abilities.
- Axe-Crazy: They’re an entire family of homicidal cannibals.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Fred’s a bitter old man who lost everything, Papa Jupiter is an abusive sadist, Pluto is a Psychopathic Manchild, Mars is a sociopath, Mama is an alcoholic former prostitute and a Jerkass, Ruby is a traumatized abuse victim who just wants out, and Mercury is mentally impaired and doesn’t seem to comprehend what he’s doing, much less the area around him.
- Cannibal Clan: Played with. The Clan is perfectly willing to eat people, but they only do it when food runs low, and even then they’re happy just stealing food and supplies from whoever has the misfortune of meeting them.
- Family Theme Naming: Not all of them, but several (Jupiter, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, Venus) are named after planets.
- Nuclear Mutant: It’s subtly implied that some of their disfigurements and mutations come from radiation from the tests the Air Force are running nearby.
- Pet the Dog: For all their backwardsness and Axe-Crazy personalities they do care for each other and react with anger at each other’s deaths.
- Serial Killer:
Papa Jupiter
Played By: James Whitworth
The sadistic, brutal, disfigured patriarch of the Clan.
- Abusive Parents: It’s pretty easy to see why his sons became vicious killers, and he physically and verbally abuses Ruby, and is implied to have raped her.
- Beard of Evil: He sports an impressively ugly beard which covers his scarred face.
- Big Bad: Leader of the Cannibal Clan terrorizing the desert.
- Cain and Abel: Fred claims that while his sister was an angelic child, Papa Jupiter was a “devil kid” who ate the livestock. His sister died in a fire he blamed Papa Jupiter for, and Fred beat him with a tire iron and left him out in the desert to die.
- Freudian Excuse: His father Fred hated him and abused him, and after a fire killed his daughter, Fred’s favorite child, Fred took Papa Jupiter beat him to near death with a tire iron and left him to die in the middle of the desert. It’s left ambiguous if this is what caused his violent nature, or if he was always evil like Fred claims.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: His face is covered with scars from Fred’s attempt on his life.
- Large and in Charge: This patriarch is the tallest member of his family.
- Made of Iron: He somehow managed to survive being beaten with a tire iron and left to die in the desert, and it takes being set on fire, stabbed with an axe, and being shot to finally kill him.
- Papa Wolf: He goes into a rage after Mercury is killed, and vows to murder the remaining Carters as revenge.
- Rasputinian Death: He gets set in fire, hacked at with an axe, and shot.
- Sadist: He takes a sick pleasure in killing his victims, and deliberately makes sure Big Bob has the most painful death possible.
- Screaming Warrior: When he commits violence he screams very loudly, but he is smart enough to do it after sneaking up.
- Talking to the Dead: After the assault on the trailer, he gleefully trash talks Big Bob’s corpse about how his family is the better one.
Mama
Played By: Cordy Clark
The alcoholic matriarch of the Clan, a former prostitute who had been kidnapped by Papa Jupiter and has apparently succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome.
- The Alcoholic: She spends the entire movie completely hammered.
- Jerkass: Her screentime consists of her drunkenly insulting Ruby.
- Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: She spends the entire climax passed out drunk.
Pluto
Played By: Michael Berryman
A deformed member of the Clan.
- Bald of Evil: Justified. His actor Michael Berryman has hypohidrotic ectodermal hyplasia, a rare genetic disorder that leaves him unable to grow hair, teeth, nails, or sweat glands.
- Defiant to the End: He taunts Beast even as he is mauled to death.
- It's Personal: With Beast, for killing Mercury.
- Oh, Crap!: When he gets attacked by Beast.
- Pet the Dog: His relationship with and treatment of the mentally handicapped Mercury humanizes him, as does his grief over his death.
- Psychopathic Manchild: There's no doubt Pluto is a vicious killer, but he's also extremely childlike.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: He serves as the Blue to Mars' Red, albeit downplayed, but he’s much more pragmatic than the needlessly sadistic Mars.
Ruby
Played By: Janus Blythe
Papa Jupiter and Mama's sole daughter, who is good natured and seeks to escape from the outside world and leave her abusive family behind.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: The only good member of the family is also the one with no physical deformities and the prettiest.
- Token Good Teammate: The only member of the Clan with ethics and morals. She finally betrays them after they decide to eat Katy, an infant.
- The Unfavorite: Papa Jupiter constantly abuses and demeans her, and is implied to have possibly raped her, with the implication he’s doing this because she reminds him of his sister, Fred's favorite child.
Mars
Played By: Lance Gordon
A sadistic, sociopathic member of the Clan.
- Beard of Evil: Much like his father, he sports one.
- Hate Sink: Out of all the Clan, he’s the only one to get no sympathetic traits whatsoever.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: His rape of Brenda is one of the most horrific moments in the film, and Mars clearly gets a lot of pleasure in making Brenda squirm.
- The Sociopath: He checks off the entire list for both the trope and real life Antisocial Personality Disorder.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Implied to be this to Jupiter, who he clearly tries to impress and emulate, but is disparaged by for his sadism and sociopathy resulting in him usually failing to get the job done.
Mercury
Played By: Peter Locke
A mentally handicapped member of the Clan.
- Disney Villain Death: Beast shoves him off a cliff to his death.
- Non-Action Guy: Mercury never attacks anyone, and instead spies on the Clan’s intended victims.
- Out of Focus: He gets the least screentime out of the Clan, and is the first to die.
- Psychopathic Manchild: He generally acts and behaves like a mentally handicapped young child rather than a violent killer.
Fred
Played By: John Steadman
Papa Jupiter’s father, who owns a gas station and desperately wants to leave the desert behind.
- Abusive Parents: He blames Papa Jupiter for his wife's Death by Childbirth and abused him for his childhood, which he claims is because he was born evil, and eventually Fred beat him with a tire iron and left him in the desert to die because he blamed him for their house burning down and killed his beloved daughter.
- Karmic Death: Papa Jupiter beats him to death with a tire iron, the same way Fred tried to kill him.
- Offing the Offspring: He tried to do this with Papa Jupiter, but Jupiter survived somehow.
- Unreliable Narrator: He claims Papa Jupiter was born evil, though it’s equally possible he caused Papa Jupiter's cruelty and evil through his abuse. Ultimately it’s left for the audience to decide whether Fred was right or not.
