--- name: "Robert Houston" canonical: "https://film.one/person/robert-houston-43980" fi1m_id: "robert-houston-43980" imdb_id: "nm0396884" tmdb_id: 43980 wikidata_id: "Q3435420" roles: ["Actor"] born: "1 January 1955" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "actor" average_over: 1 updated: "2026-09-26T00:26:00.334639+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Robert Houston ## Identity Robert Houston - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/robert-houston-43980 - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** robert-houston-43980 - **IMDb ID:** nm0396884 - **TMDB ID:** 43980 - **Wikidata ID:** Q3435420 - **Same entity:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Houston_(actor), https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3435420, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0396884/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/43980 Actor. Born 1 January 1955 in California. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 1 January 1955, California - **Also known as:** Bobby Houston, Bob Houston - **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar (1 won · 1 nominated) - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Houston_(actor), https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3435420, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0396884/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/43980 ## Fi1m on Robert Houston > Robert Houston's screen acting amounts to one part, played twice, and the first time he gave Wes Craven's desert horror the moment where it stops being a shocker and starts being about people. He then left acting and made films of his own. Bobby Carter goes into the hills after the dog. What he finds there we will leave in the hills, but the film's best moment is not the finding. It is the walk back, and the look on Robert Houston's face as the boy decides his family will be better off not knowing. Wes Craven's *The Hills Have Eyes* (1977) is cheap and in places badly acted, and we sat down expecting to be jolted. Instead that face upset us more than any of the violence that follows it. For a minute or so a shocker became a story about people, and it was a teenager in his first film who did it. That is, near enough, the whole of Houston's acting. He played Bobby again in the 1984 sequel and then stopped. He had studied documentary filmmaking at Harvard, moved to Los Angeles and taken up acting because it was the easiest way into the business; he has since said that he felt uncomfortable doing it. It shows nowhere in the performance. Most actors who spend a career trying to look as if they are thinking never manage what Houston managed once, on his way to another job, in the desert. What he did instead is a stranger career than most actors get. His first film as director was *Shogun Assassin* (1980), which is a re-edit rather than a film of his own: two Japanese *Lone Wolf and Cub* films cut together, dubbed into English, given a new score and a narration, and sent out to the grindhouses, where they were loved. Admirers say he made something fast and coherent from the pieces; others call it a butchering. Both are describing the same film. We have not reviewed it, so we will only say that the editing hand is the interesting part. He then wrote and directed two independent features, *Bad Manners* (1984) and *Trust Me* (1989), before turning in the late 1990s to documentaries: *Rock the Boat* (1998), about an HIV-positive crew in the Trans-Pacific Yacht Race, and the *Mighty Times* shorts on civil rights history, made with the producer Robert Hudson. None of that is acting. If you want to see what Houston could do in front of a camera there is one film, it is a good one, and the boy in it is the reason it works. Whether he would have gone on being that good we cannot know, because he did not go on. Most actors are judged by what they kept doing; Houston has to be judged by what he stopped. ## Biography Robert Houston, also credited as Bobby Houston or Bob Houston, is an American actor, director and screenwriter. Born in 1955 in California, he graduated from Harvard before entering film. Houston made his acting debut as Bobby Carter in Wes Craven's *The Hills Have Eyes* (1977) and reprised the role in the 1984 sequel. He directed and co-wrote the English-language samurai film *Shogun Assassin* (1980) and the comedy *Bad Manners* (1984). Later in his career Houston focused on documentaries. He directed *Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks* (2002), which won a Daytime Emmy Award, and *Mighty Times: The Children's March* (2004), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 2005. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *The Hills Have Eyes* (1977), Fi1m 74, as Bobby Carter — [page](https://film.one/film/the-hills-have-eyes.md) ## Complete filmography (15) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Mighty Times: The Children's March* (2004), Director - *Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks* (2002), Director - *American's Most Wanted* (2002), Director - *Little Secret* (1999), Director - *Rock the Boat* (1999), Director - *Playboy Video Playmate Calendar 1994* (1993), Director - *Playboy's Erotic Fantasies* (1992), Director - *Caged Fear* (1991), Story, Director - *Trust Me* (1989), Director, Writer - *A Killing Affair* (1985), Novel - *The Hills Have Eyes Part 2* (1985), as Bobby - *Bad Manners* (1984), as Retard · Writer, Director - *Shogun Assassin* (1980), as Voice (voice) · Screenplay, Director, Producer - *The Great American Girl Robbery* (1979), as Billy - *The Hills Have Eyes* (1977), as Bobby Carter — Fi1m 74, [page](https://film.one/film/the-hills-have-eyes.md) ## Awards ### Academy Awards — 1 won, 1 nominated - 2005: Best Documentary (Short Subject) (won), for *Mighty Times: The Children's March* - 2003: Best Documentary (Short Subject) (nominated), for *Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks* *From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.* --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/robert-houston-43980