Craven is rightly famous for rejuvenating an entire genre with his healthy injection of irony, but here irony seems to have been entirely replaced with bucketloads of vicious gore. Still, there is so little to Craven's latest film that it is hard to believe it comes from the legend behind such savvy horror as The People Under the Stairs, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and Scream.
While the desert scenery is pretty enough, and the red stuff flows in a pleasing torrent of gougings, eviscerations and bone-crushing mayhem, a complete lack of sophistication in dialogue or characterisation ensures that, viewed as anything other than a quick cash-in on last year's gleefully over-the-top remake, the film is pretty worthless.Īll this might be put down to tradition - after all, Craven's original 1977 film is one of the most overrated shockers in horror history, while its original sequel, complete with a risible flashback from a dog's point of view, was generally deemed a disaster even at the time of its 1985 release. The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a bog-standard pick-'em-off-one-by-one splatterfest. Trapped in the cliffs and low on ammunition, the survivors have little choice but to enter the system of caves and mines that may be their only way back down - but which are also home to the monstrous family. As the group uncovers evidence of a brutal massacre, they come under attack from an all-male family of mutants intent on grabbing the women for their beds and the men for their pot. The research camp appears to have been abandoned, but someone or something is watching from the rocky hills above. And yet, like the deformed baby born in the film's opening sequence, The Hills Have Eyes 2 looks destined to have a very short life-span, as big daddy Craven's creative juices deteriorate with each passing year (just think of his most recent horror monstrosity Cursed, or the utterly conventional thriller Red Eye).Ī unit of young National Guard trainees is sent on a routine mission to deliver equipment to military scientists in the top-secret desert area known as Sector 16. There is even a theme of parenthood running through the film as though to underscore the shift in generations. This time round Craven has returned to pen the script, but in recognition of the mutations required to adapt his old ideas for a younger audience, he has turned to his own son Jonathan as co-writer, and handed the helm to newbie director Martin Weisz, who cut his teeth on the controversial (if bland) true-life cannibal pic Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story (2006). The Hills Have Eyes 2 may be set only two years (and made one year) after half the Carter clan was slaughtered by desert cannibals in Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur's The Hills Have Eyes (2006), but given that the latter was itself a reimagining of a much-loved Wes Craven flick made some three decades earlier, and given that Craven's original had already spawned a sequel (The Hills Have Eyes Part II) in 1985, this all-new sequel comes with a complicated and incestuous pedigree.