The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Unrated Edition)

• Actors: Cécile Breccia, Michael Bailey Smith, Archie Kao, Jay Acovone, Jeff Kober.
• Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC.
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround). Subtitles: English, Spanish.
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only).
• Run Time: 89 minutes. Rated R.

Based on the original film by fright master Wes Craven, The Hills Have Eyes is the story of a family road trip that goes terrifyingly awry when the travelers become stranded in a government atomic zone. Miles from nowhere, the Carter family soon realizes the seemingly uninhabited wasteland is actually the breeding ground of a blood-thirsty mutant family...and they are the prey.Boasting an upgrade in production values, The Hills Have Eyes should please new-generation horror fans without offend! ing devotees of Wes Craven's original version from 1977. There's still something to be said for the gritty shock value of Craven's low-budget original, made at a time when horror had been relegated to the pop-cultural ghetto, mostly below the radar of major Hollywood studios. With the box-office resurgence of horror in the new millennium--and the genre's lucrative popularity among the all-important teen demographic--it's only fitting that French director Alexandre Aja should follow up his international hit High Tension with a similarly brutal American debut to boost his Hollywood street-cred. Working with cowriter Gregory Levasseur, Aja remains surprisingly faithful to Craven's original, beginning with a bickering family that crashes their truck and trailer in the remote desert of New Mexico (actually filmed in Morocco), where they are subsequently terrorized, brutalized, and murdered by a freakish family of psychopaths, mutated by the lingering radiation from 331 nu! clear bomb tests that were carried out during the 1950s and '6! 0s. Afte r several killings are carried out in memorably grisly fashion, it's left to the survivors to outsmart their disfigured tormentors, who are blessed with horrendous make-up (especially Robert Joy as freak leader "Lizard") but never quite as unsettling as the original film's horror icon, Michael Berryman. In Aja's hands, this newfangled Hills is all about savagery and de-evolution, reducing its characters to a state of pure, retaliatory terror. It's hardly satisfying in terms of storytelling (since there's hardly any story to tell), but as an exercise in sheer malevolence, it's undeniably effective.--Jeff ShannonNational Guard soldiers stop at a New Mexican outpost only to find the isolated camp mysteriously deserted. Little do they know that these are the very hills that the ill-fated Carter family once visited, and that a tribe of cannibalistic mutants lies in wait.

For die-hard horror fans, The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a knock-off remake/sequel that deliv! ers a few queasy thrills. While it represents a minor improvement over the 1985 sequel to Wes Craven's 1977 original (you know, the one with the notorious "canine flashback"), it's yet another cookie-cutter exercise in death by stupidity, focusing its Aliens-in-the-desert plot on a scrappy, ill-tempered unit of National Guard soldiers who've been sent to investigate the first remake's hellish aftermath in the bomb-tested wastelands of Nevada. (Like its far-superior 2006 predecessor, this sequel was shot on location in Morocco.) Unfortunately these bickering recruits are an embarrassment to their inauthentic-looking uniforms, and their reckless inexperience (not to mention a tired, uninspired screenplay by Craven and his son Jonathan) makes them easy targets for the ravenous, irradiated mutants who dwell within a treacherous network of tunnels and caves. As the generically good-looking cast is reduced to a few terrorized survivors (which somehow doesn't stop costars Jessica ! Stroup and Daniella Alonso from looking like fashion models), ! music-vi deo director Martin Weisz switches to auto-pilot in his dubious feature debut, serving up a basically plotless succession of grisly makeup FX by Howard Berger and his crack team of gore-mongers. The gross-out factor is sufficiently amusing (including one soldier pulled through a hole with one leg in the totally wrong direction), but even devoted horror connoisseurs will have to admit this is pretty lame stuff. --Jeff Shannon

Beyond The Hills Have Eyes 2

All Hills Have Eyes Movies

The Hills Have Eyes: The Beginning

Wes Craven: The Art of Horror

Stills from The Hills Have Eyes