The Hills Have Eyes 2: Worth Looking At?

My review...

In 2006 the Wes Craven horror film The Hills Have Eyes was remade, and now comes the sequel. The first remake was a fun action adventure of the shocking kind, however does The Hills Have Eyes 2 have that same vibe to make it a hit?

The Hills Have Eyes 2 was directed by Martin Weisz and written by the father and son team of Wes Craven and Jonathan Craven. This time a group of National Guard trainees find themselves in the infamous desert area: Sector 16, once used as a nuclear testing ground, and fighting for their lives against the mutants living within the cavernous hills. The mutants of course want to eat the soldiers and use the females for breeding.

They try to recapture the “in your face”, jump inducing sort of violence like was used in the first remake, however it falls short. There was a period of time where I actually wanted to yawn because overall the movie was becoming formulaic in that people would be baited by a loony hopping around the rocks, and then one of them would die. The first remake just seemed more brutal than this, however, of course, this is a sequel and those who saw the first aren’t going to fall for the same old tricks. Therefore the film is quite predictable in several ways. One other way that the film was predictable was in who would end up being the male survivor. The first remake was fun because the character you would vote to be the first to die and an not altogether strong man ended up being the best fighter, and from the get-go in part 2 they show one of the characters as being an anti-war nerdy sort of fellow. Immediately I knew what his character arc would be, which indeed came to fruition in many ways, though they should have at least exploited it for more fun scenarios.

There was plenty of outrage from people about the content of this film, especially a scene involving rape. However, the rape scene is not as volatile as protesters would claim, as far as rape scenes go that is, and really this film does not pack the same sick punch as the first remake; which also included a nasty rape.

Error-wise, firstly the soldiers do not come off as any sort of people that have been going through training. On top of that there is a moment when two of the soldiers are separated from the rest of the group; the group goes into the hills, the two stay back at camp. Well to navigate the hills it shows that the main group takes some time and at one point they even have to use their climbing gear; with only one of them shown as being adept at the climb. Later when the other two rush up into the hills to rejoin the group, however, they arrive almost immediately apparently able to magically jump their way to the others location?

All of the negatives aside, this film is around average violent horror fodder. It is not the worst and does a decent job of continuing the series, I would even watch a third one. The ending for this second one is as intriguing as it is confusing; slightly disappointing, however, if you were a fan of the first remake be sure to check this one out to make your own comparisons.