The Hills Have Eyes 2

A team of trainees of the National Guard brings supply to the New Mexico Desert for a group of soldiers and scientists that are installing a monitoring system in Sector 16. They do not find anybody in the camp, and they receive a blurred distress signal from the hills. Their sergeant gathers a rescue team, and they are attacked and trapped by deformed cannibals, having to fight to survive.

The 1977 "The Hills Have Eyes" is a classic of horror and the 2006 version is an unnecessary, but good remake. This sequel is shameful, using a predictable collection of clichés and violence to explore the success of the original movies. The rookies soldiers have the most imbecile and unreasonable attitudes along the story, probably because they have been trained by the ridiculous sergeant, facilitating the retarded evil creatures to destroy one by one. This disappointing film was a great deception for me. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "O Retorno dos Malditos" ("The Return of the Damned")

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.

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.

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.