Two years after the events of the first film (yet only one year after the release of that hit horror remake), The Hills Have Eyes II sends a squad of U.S. Army National Guard trainees back into Sector 16, that stretch of desolate desert where the wild things are. In this case, “wild things” refer to the inbred family of radiation-mutated hillbillies who live in the mountain caves, yet kill largely out in the open.
Working from a script from Wes Craven (director of the 1977 original and its 1984 sequel) and son Jonathan Craven (Mind Ripper), Martin Weisz (Grimm Love) makes the movie look like it belongs to Hills 2006, yet doesn’t do quite the same thing, which would have been easier … and lazier. Instead, he ups the ante of gore and general discomfort, opening with a scene certain to have cleared its theater audiences of noncommittals, as a newborn who is clearly a product of mutant rape slimes its way out of the bloody orifice of a nude, bound blonde (Cécile Breccia, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder).
Competing with that most unconventional home birth for sickest scene are a forced French kiss from Pustule Man, a sledgehammer to the scrotum and, involving our likable-enough protagonists (Banshee Chapter’s Michael McMillian and the Prom Night remake’s Jessica Stroup), a port-a-potty surprise! The details of each, I leave for you to discover. That’s not to say every move Weisz and the Cravens made was a good one; no matter their intention, having one of the deformed cannibal clan members assisting the American soldiers smacks of Sloth in The Goonies: greasy kids’ stuff perfectly at home in PG family fare … and wildly out of place for hard-R horror.
Nothing in these Hills distinguishes itself from being a Wrong Turn sequel (to name-check another blood-drenched 20th Century Fox franchise). Not when one of the redneck mutants machetes an arm off a good guy hanging from a cliff, then uses that lopped-off limb to wave at the G.I. falling to his death. I get it. —Rod Lott