The Hills Have Eyes 2

The first "The Hills Have Eyes" creeped me out so of course I had to see the second. This time the good guys have guns (in my best southern accent).

A military unit was sent out to the New Mexico desert to bring aid and supplies. Of course, when they get to the seemingly abandoned outpost they run into the rejects of The Toxic Avengers.

I was thinking, "OK now. Now we got some bad mofos with guns, it's about to be on. These circus side show freaks are about to get dealt with military style!" Oh yeah, I was hyped.

Of course there wouldn't be much of a movie then if that happened. After all, these missing links did survive nuclear testing, so what're a few dudes with guns? Prepare for some serious casualties in horrific fashion and more mutant on human violence.

This movies is basically in the category of what you see is what you get. The Hills Have Eyes II is what you would expect of course it's not going to be an Oscar nominated film, it's just pure entertainment which you can just lose yourself in for 90 minutes. This movie is about a group of soldiers who find themselves against mutated hillbillies. In the desert and on their last day of training they find themselves fighting these hillbillies. This movie is full of blood and guts and is extremely violent. The Hills have Eyes II is a wonderful gory film that will keep you wanting to close your eyes. But keep watching and enjoy the movie. Make sure to watch for all that gore flying through.

The 2006 remake of "The Hills Have Eyes" was a decent slasher-in-the-desert flick; forgettable but entertaining nevertheless. So here we have the 2007 sequel.

A group of National Guard trainees go to a mysterious camp in the New Mexican desert to resupply and train, but they find it abandoned. They soon discover that the barren "hills" are infested with a bunch of hideous mutant cannibals. Can they get out alive?

I was actually impressed with the serious and sometimes moving vibe this film has. It may be a gory slasher flick, but the filmmakers make it respectable. The cussing-every-other-word tends to bring the respectability down, but I was in the Marines and this was how enlisted guys talked in the field, generally speaking. By "moving" I refer to the love & loyalty that members of the team reveal for each other over the course of the story and the accompanying score.

Some complain about the stupid mistakes the soldiers make but, remember, they're trainees, and National Guardsmen at that, not career soldiers. Besides, mistakes are always made in the heat of life-or-death combat.

I heard someone else complain about Jessica Stroup being too good-looking to be a soldier, but I've seen some hot enlisted babes. One girl I knew from high school enlisted in the army and she sent me a pic of her at an Army party in Europe wearing a bunny costume and she was as hot as any Hollywood starlet you'd care to name (she's now a cougar Colonel, lol).

The problem with this movie is the thin plot. My description above is the entire story. The whole film's an intense survival situation.

Those who like gory slasher or survival flicks should like this, especially if you prefer military-oriented stories. I'm only giving it a fairly low rating because it's not a film I'm anxious to see again. There's just not enough depth, epic-ness or hot women for my tastes (although Jessica Stroup has a really cute face), but that's just me.

The film was shot in Morroco (of all places) and runs a short-but-sweet 89 minutes.

The DVD I saw is the unrated version.

GRADE: C+ (or B for gory slasher fans)

Between 1945 and 1962 the United States conducted 33 atmospheric nuclear tests. Today the government still denies the genetic effects caused by the radioactive fallout located in sector 16. A team of soldiers(Jacob Vargas, Daniella Alonso,Jessica Stroup, McMillian, among them) from National Guard carries supply for a scientific group . But a mysterious unseen deformed humans drag away and attack them. The anthropophagous beings murder and dismember the soldiers one by one, having to combat to survive.

This unsettling gore-feast contains thrills, chills horror, grisly murders and lots of guts and gore, including, stabbing, impalement, beheading, among others. The killings are gruesomely committed by the cannibal mutants who hold an eerie make-up by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger , an excellent craftsmen.The storyline by Wes Craven borrows from the commandos war movies along with the classics¨Texas chainsaw massacre(Hooper)¨, ¨The hills have eyes(Craven)¨until recent films like ¨Wrong turn and House of 1000 corpses¨, and of course the first part directed by Alexander Aja(2006).The creepy maniacal creatures appearance deliver the goods plenty of screams, terror,violence and blood. Atmospheric and suspenseful musical score by Trevor Morris. Colorful cinematography and a little dark during underground scenes by Sam McCurdy. The motion picture is professionally directed by Martin Weisz(Rohtenburg). The tale will like to horror and gore buffs. Rating : acceptable and passable, but isn't apt for squeamish

Last year's remake of 'The Hills Have Eyes' was one of the better attempts to update the vaguely exploitational horror flicks of the 1970s for a new audience. Alexandre Aja allowed for an admirable degree of character development and when the violence started it was mean and savage and all carried out in a landscape of impeccable photography and production design. I was one of the few people who actually thought that it was better than the original and looked forward to a second visit to the particularly dark and cruel world of the savage desert mutants.

'The Hills have Eyes 2', released just a year after the original, seems a rushed and ill-conceived attempt to cash in on the franchise with little thought to quality. Jonathan Craven's screenplay could have been written in a weekend, and given the speed with which this movie made it into cinemas, probably was. It falls back on every hackneyed genre cliché in the book while offering absolutely nothing new to the desert mutant mythology. I always let out a groan of disappointment when a sequel replaces civilian characters with the military. Soldiers are always so lazily written and never fail to thoroughly bore with crude caricatures of strutting macho bullshit. In my mind, 'Aliens' was the only movie to successfully make such a transition, due to James Cameron's talent, not simply for directing the best action sequences around, but never forgetting that an audience has to care about the people being butchered. He was also ably assisted by some genuinely talented actors. With 'The Hills have Eyes 2', it's clear that video director Martin Weisz is no James Cameron, and the cast of television bit-parters haven't the talent or even the inclination to turn their cardboard cutout characters into anything approaching living, breathing human beings.

Needless to say, every character is a broad and generic cliché. They act in dumb and illogical ways, making dumb and illogical decisions that lead them to predictably dumb and illogical deaths. The latter half of the movie becomes just another tedious chased-through-dark-corridors scenario. 'The Descent' (on which Sam McCurdy, coincidentally, also worked as cinematography) proved that even this most derivative of sequences can still be carried out with genuine originality and suspense, but we see no such innovation here.

'The Hills Have Eyes 2' is just a very lazy movie, devoid of any suspense, tension, or surprise, with not a single individual involved remotely interested in producing anything of quality. It's a tame and tired excuse for a sequel and deserves to spend the rest of its life in a Blockbuster's bargain bin.