Two years ago the Carter family, who were traveling across the country, got lost in the deserts of New Mexico and ended up on an old military site know as Section 16. Over the course of the next 24 hours members of the Carter family would be ambushed, hunted and butchered by a clan of deprived cannibals who have lived in the hills living and feeding off of all who ventured into their hunting grounds. Members of the Carter family that made it out of the desert, told their tale of horror to local authorities and since then the military has been monitoring the valley in hopes of finding some trace of the beings the Carter's described. Nothing has been reported since then, nothing until… NOW!

The sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes hits the screen written by Wes Craven, the creator of the original film, and his son Jonathan. Much like the actual sequel to the original film's sequel, this sequel sucks as well, only not quite as much.

I had high hopes for this one from the trailers and fairly simple storyline which goes like this, a small group of National Guard head into Section 16 to resupply a few scientists who are doing research on the mutants of cannibal valley. As you can imagine, the soldiers arrive just in time to find out that the mutant clan are back to their old tricks of killing and eating everyone in sight.

Two seconds off of their transport the weekend warriors lock and load and begin to bust caps and ass on the desert wildmen. And that's really it, you think with a simple little plot like that it would be pretty hard to fuck it up, but somehow Craven and son do just that.

First off, let's get this out of the way, The Hills Have Eyes 2 is bloody and violent and it does have some pretty damn decent kills. The ending is like watching a pro-wrestling match with hardcore rules and the only way you win is by killing your opponent, beat that one E.C.W.

There is also a truly vile scene that shows how the cannibal clan repopulates itself. In fact after watching it, I had to immediately call W.L. Paynecraft and ask for his forgiveness. Sorry Payne, I now truly know how I made you feel that night.

But these brief moments of hardcore violence and shock just can't make up for the entire clichéd story, horrendous dialog and stereotypical characters.

Aside from it's 2007 release date, the feel and everything else about this film really belongs back in the mid 80's. It just seems washed down and played out. Perhaps that blame lies with Wes Craven, as the remake by Alexandre Aja, was very well done from start to finish. It seems to me that this film was Craven's attempt to make a sequel to his original film, but using the remake to do so, if that makes any sense at all.

The cannibals themselves are a little nastier this time, especially the big brute Hades, even if he does look like the Elephant Man on steroids, and actor Michale Baily Smith, who played Pluto in the ‘06 version, deserves a little nod of respect, but in truth I think they actually only show a total of four in this one.

The rest of the cast: crazy gun guy, dumb fat guy, hot blonde, blue eyed chick, sassy black girl, nerdy hero and gruff drill sergeant would fit into any horror movie ever made, they’re just all bad in every way. And when they spout lines like, "Yeah, get some!", "I'm not leaving him here", or any of the other sad dialog to be had, you just wish the crazies would heave a rock at them and end the torture for all of us.

As you can tell I didn't really care for this one to much and aside from a couple of original ideas and decent blood splatter, I can't really give this one high marks. The dialog and some of the story aspects just didn't do it for me. However after watching this film, I will never be able to use a porta-a-potty again without fearing for my life, so I guess that's something.

4 of 10

I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be as good as the original (remake), but given what I had seen in the teaser and full-length trailers, I too had not great, but pretty decent expectations for this movie. I have to admit, I left the theater feeling a bit let down.

I’ll start off with the good: There were a few good jump scares, and it felt like there was more blood in the first 5 minutes of this movie than in the entire first film. For those of you who haven’t seen The Hills ‘06, that’s a lotta blood. But despite the significant increase in gore, it didn’t affect me or leave me feeling disturbed nearly as much as it did in the first film, and that is because of… the piss-poor characters.

In The Hills ‘06, we were presented with a family of believable characters. Whether they were like your family or not, you could at least relate to them somewhat or feel for their situation. Not so in The Hills Have Eyes 2. As Prime alluded to (and I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt this way), it feels like they just pulled a pack of clichéd teen characters from a number of 80’s horror movies, aged them about 5-10 years, and stuck them in National Guardsmen uniforms.

Not only were the characters cliché, but they were idiots too. Unless you count the fact that 3 of my 4 parental units were involved in the military at some point, I have had absolutely zilcho military training in my 28 years of life. Yet even poor little civilian me could point out mistake after mistake that this group of elite freak-tards made. Thus, it was almost impossible for me to give a rat’s hairy heiny about any of them. And just like most 80’s horror movies, you pretty much knew who was going to live and who was going to die within the first 15 minutes.

There’s another thing about this movie and it’s portrayal of the military that actually kinda pissed me off, but for the sake of not giving away any spoilers, I’ll save that for a discussion thread.

Back on the topic of cliché moves, The Hills Have Eyes 2 even features a Hills theme song (how 80’s is that) during the closing credits, but it wasn’t nearly as good as (or at least memorable as) The Man Behind the Mask by Alice Cooper (F13th part 6) or Dream Warriors by Dokken (NOES part 3). Just an interesting side note.

All-in-all, this wasn’t a god-awful flick, but I was expecting a lot more. I give it 5 out of 10 reasons to flush twice before you even think of using a port-a-potty.