The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)
Review by The Fiend of Grue
In 2006, new horror director sensation Alexandre Aja (High Tension) brought to us a remake of the 1977 Wes Craven helmed The Hills Have Eyes. It was received with a warm welcome for the most part in the horror community and actually wasn’t a bad remake. The movie did well at the box office bringing in $41 million domestically so naturally when there is money to be made, a studio will jump at the chance to make a sequel, especially when it’s a horror picture. Soon after the success of the remake, Fox Atomic announced plans for a follow up. Without Alexandre Aja returning to direct the film, it was doomed from the get-go it seems and when it came out in theaters earlier this year it came and went in a matter of a couple of weeks.
The Hills Have Eyes 2 tells the story of a team of scientists that decent into the hills of Sector 16 (same town as the remake), a place that was the site of nuclear experiments in the 1950’s. As a team of National Guard trainees come to deliver equipment to the scientists, they can’t find them. Through all sorts of childish bickering and complaining amongst the trainees, the sergeant of the group orders a search and rescue mission, fearing that something has gone afoul. The more they search out their missing comrades, the more bloody the trail gets as they also discover that the hills have eyes…
I, for one, enjoyed the remake quite a lot and, dare I say, even liked it better than the original (ducks for cover). I’m not opposed to remakes, but usually they fail to deliver a better product than what they are remaking, but Aja’s Hills was one of the exceptions. The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a seriously flawed movie that continuously stumbles over itself until it falls off a cliff and crashes in a bloody heap to the jagged rocks below, but for some weird and ungodly reason, I still kind of liked it. It was mindless fun I guess you could say.
Where to begin with the flaws…well, the characters were all so annoying that you’ll be hoping they have the grisliest of deaths. Right from the get-go the trainees come off as probably the dumbest military personal of all time. It’s incredible how many stupid decisions these dimwits make in this movie. The trainees are more like college co-eds instead of military might. The way they argue and their dialogue in general makes them seem like a bratty fraternity in camo. The movie was written by Wes Craven and his son Jonathan and with Wes’ experience alone, you would think he would come up with better characters. And what in the hell were the Cravens thinking when they wrote the Port-A Pottie scene??? There is a scene where a guy is taking a dump in a Port-A Pottie and a guy reaches up through the seat at him. Once he is drug out covered in dung and cuts, he says “They’re here!” and then dies. No explanation for what he was doing in the toilet whatsoever! How dumb!
The mutants in this movie hide in the mountains and are much more unorganized and unfamily like, but smarter than the mutants in the remake. In primitive fashion, they seek out their prey, hiding in secret holes that descend into the mountain where they live in the old mineshafts. They seek out women to rape and have their children so their ranks can continue to grow. The downside to the mutants in this entry is their lack of individuality. The remake boasted several colorful mutants who stood out from one another, but the same cannot be said for the sequel. Most of the mutants blend together, with no real distinction between them except for maybe a mutant called Chameleon whose dirty boils lets him blend in with the rocks.
KNB returns to do the effects for the sequel and as expected does a fantastic job in the grue department. Unfortunately, there were no scenes to match the trailer scene or the burning man-tree scene from the remake, but there are some fairly good moments. One scene involves a soldier hanging onto a cliff when all the sudden a mutant appears, cuts off his arm and waves to him with it as he falls to the ground several stories below gushing blood. Another great KNB moment is when the trainees unexpectedly find a body part room. Pretty gross stuff indeed.
What this movie is missing most is Alexandre Aja’s touch and his vision. He did an amazing job with the remake and it is clear from the very beginning of the sequel that director Martin Weisz does not have the same goods in store for us. The scares are not there, the suspense is very lacking and it fails on most levels. I couldn’t recommend this movie to you with a clear conscious, but I also can’t say to avoid it all together either. Every once in awhile a movie comes along like this, that no matter how much of a mess that it obviously is, for some reason I still “like” it. So if you enjoyed the remake and can turn off your brain, sit back and space out to a dumb ‘n’ fun kind of movie, then you may, just may, kind of like this one too.
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