Review of The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007) by Chuck D — 18 May 2010

In The Hills Have Eyes 2 it's hard to tell if the hills are rolling or if that's just my eyes. Having watched the movie, the hills should be rolling theirs. The first movie was about a family under siege from irradiated mutants in the deserts of New Mexico. This one is about an audience under siege from increasingly lax Hollywood quality controls. Everything about it is bad - unexpectedly awful - but if I were eight and still doodled pencil sketches of Freddy and Jason flinging lightning at each other in my notebook, I'm sure I'd love it. And while I still occasionally doodle slashers in my idle time, I do like to think my sensibilities have evolved enough to see a cash grab when it's there. Not that it offends me too much. These are movies about mutant cannibals grunting behind rocks and sticking people with axes. I liked the first one, but I don't consider the downfall of the franchise to be some great loss.

I wonder if James Cameron knew he was creating an entire new subgenre when he made Aliens some twenty-two years ago. Because of the cosmic success of that film, we now and forever have the Sequel That Brings in the Military. I suppose it's irony that the military operates in storytelling much the same way it does in real life: you send it in when you've got no other ideas. Not that mixing army with aliens, mutants, psychos, or ghosts is necessarily a bad idea, it's just that it's usually born out of a lack of better ideas and this same kind of half-assed, one-handed ethic is also brought into the script and the acting and the directing and the effects and thus we have movies like The Hills Have Eyes 2. This is a movie about the most incompetent and irritating group of soldiers this side of F-Troop. I'm unsure of how competent its makers really are, but after enduring their movie I'm not interested in giving them further opportunities to show me.

I suppose there are characters in Hills Have Eyes 2, just as I suppose there is a story, but the script by Wes Craven (yes, that Wes Craven) and his son Jonathan is a slush bucket of gore set-pieces and grotesquely shameless clichés. I would like to at least say that the film skimps on character in exchange for good ol' American bloodletting, but even the blood-n-guts seem stagy and weak. Even on the basest level, this movie's goods are no good. The makeup is shoddy and rubbery and sometimes computer effects are brought in to make it look even worse. There is one character whose body is covered in lumps, and I was reminded of the monster in Larry Buchanan's Attack of the the Eye Creatures (yes, you read that right) when I kept looking for a zipper up the back.

Leading the soldier stereotypes is Private Napoleon (Michael McMillian) who is nerdy and shy and probably wouldn't otherwise be caught dead in the National Guard if this crummy script hadn't put him there. Napoleon gets his whole squad 'killed' during a training exercise that doesn't look like any kind of actual training I've ever seen, but is necessary to produce the appropriate amount of derision from his equally poorly written comrades. We also have the chick (two of them, actually), we have the bitter Latino, the smooth hunk, a few others that are too boring to list, and we round things off nicely with the tough talking African-American Sergeant who puts up with no nonsense even as he gives his troop ludicrous orders that ultimately get them all killed. That's his purpose. Just as Napoleon's purpose is to be incompetent and mousy, and the women are to be sexy, and the Latino is to be grouchy and hot-headed, and so on and so forth. None of this requires any kind of skill beyond the ability ot read. They may as well have cast the movie with chess pieces.

Now that we've established that the characters are as deep as a mud puddle in Death Valley, let's go over the movie's broad lapses in common sense and basic refusal to allow its characters to do anything that won't get them murdered. Now, it is an understatement to say that I am not a soldier, but I'm quite sure that leaving your weapons laying around out of sight for hostile baddies to steal is not National Guard SOP. Just as I am also sure that failing to search an abandoned military outpost for trouble, or having the Sergeant walk right into friendly fire aren't either. According The Hills Have Eyes 2, when surrounded by axe-wielding cannibals that live in caves, soldiers should take refuge in those very caves and waste all their ammunition and make enough noise to be noticed and hatcheted/sliced/skinned/whatever. And then there is dialogue like this:

Private Mickey: "My leg's asleep.".

Private "Crank": "Ha! Your DICK's asleep!".

Someone, quick, call Paddy Chayevsky. They're stealing his thunder.

And so, of course, the nerd learns to fight, the women fend off advances from human and mutant alike, the grouch ends up his own worst enemy, and the hunk becomes half the man he was. There is nothing new here, but I could have lived with that so long as the movie had been remotely interesting. It wasn't. The first movie wasn't a masterpiece (could any film like this be?) but at least it had chemistry in its cast and we got to spend some time with its characters before the smorgasbord. I guess this is a tacky genre, but even geek theatre has its charms. There is a bar to be reached here, believe it or not. Personally, I think it's time to put it back up to the heights that Carpenter set with Halloween, and get real chills and tension and characters with all the stabbing. By today's standards, now that would be a mutant indeed.

SCORE: 2 / 10.