The Hills Have Eyes 2

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)

Even though it was generally well-received by genre fans, I found the remake of classic "The Hills Have Eyes" to be a typical modern remake. The casting was questionable and the overused shaky-cam was nausea-inducing. French director Alejandra Aja bypassed the original's subtle commentary on the American family post-Vietnam for some half-assed shock scenes that he claimed better fit the contemporary American situation. Huh? I also found the storyline to be much too close to it's predecessor.

Well, the sequel is a surprising improvement (and significantly better than the original's sequel from '85, too.) The storyline is different, the shaky-cam is only used a couple times (and less...shaky), and the filmmakers were wise enough to ditch the half-baked social commentary for a straight-up horror gorefest. And it's a lot of nasty fun! There's lots of very sick ideas here that most horror fans can probably appreciate. The acting is average, the characters are pretty much indistinguishable, and it's rather formulaic, but if you can get past all of that, then this one is good times.

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.

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.

I had actually liked the remake of Wes Craven's Hills Have Eyes, which was shown here last year. Directed by Alxandre Aja, it was top notch violence and gore which actually sent a chill, because the victims were an innocent family out for a holiday, and to see them getting systematically deeper into trouble, somehow makes it rather horrific to sit through.

While its predecessor was shown here with cuts, The Hills Have Eyes II is shown here in its full gory glory. However you wonder, just where did all the blood and gore had gone. Written by father and son team Wes and Jonathan Craven, the follow up movie (also a remake of the sequel to the original) seemed to be lacking in flavour and spirit. Sure the mutants are back, but there's very little space given to set them up, or enough time for you to identify and distinguish one from the other.

Did director Martin Weisz opt to play it safe? There's tension built, but nothing too riveting. The narrative is simple and straightforward, without much thought into trying to capture the X-factor why the original had worked somehow. Attempting to shock just for shock's sake, the movie opens with the birth of a child, in the most un-Discovery Channel manner, before introducing us to the victims, I mean, characters, and a short scene to link the events from its predecessor.

Again the military's dirty hands are in this one. Gone are the family, and in comes a small squad of National Guard trainees. It's soldiers versus A-bomb mutants, so the numbers come in handy to build up the body count. But in fact, none of them died in any creative manner. It's the usual hack jobs, and more uninterestingly, through the use of their carbines. Boring, and I guess too many movies outdoing one another in the creative death department, has taken its toil on this one, where simpleness and sure death like falling from great heights without the camera flinching, go unappreciated. Truth is, you know that it's a camera trick, and boy, are there a number of recognizable indoor shots for this outdoor movie, that makes it look cheap.

By the time it takes for these rookie soldiers to complete their training to the dark side and become cold killers (fighting for their own survival), you'll be more than in a hurry to head for the exit. To enjoy this movie, the usual leave your brains at the door cliché applies. Just make sure someone doesn't take a real machete and help you put it there.