The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)

The Hills Have Eyes 2: Directed by Martin Weisz. With Cécile Breccia, Michael Bailey Smith, Archie Kao, Jay Acovone. A group of National Guard trainees find themselves battling against a vicious group of mutants on their last day of training in the desert.

“Last yearu0026#39;s remake of u0026#39;The Hills Have Eyesu0026#39; was one of the better attempts to update the vaguely exploitational horror flicks of the 1970s for a new audience. Alexandre Aja allowed for an admirable degree of character development and when the violence started it was mean and savage and all carried out in a landscape of impeccable photography and production design. I was one of the few people who actually thought that it was better than the original and looked forward to a second visit to the particularly dark and cruel world of the savage desert mutants.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eu0026#39;The Hills have Eyes 2u0026#39;, released just a year after the original, seems a rushed and ill-conceived attempt to cash in on the franchise with little thought to quality. Jonathan Cravenu0026#39;s screenplay could have been written in a weekend, and given the speed with which this movie made it into cinemas, probably was. It falls back on every hackneyed genre cliché in the book while offering absolutely nothing new to the desert mutant mythology. I always let out a groan of disappointment when a sequel replaces civilian characters with the military. Soldiers are always so lazily written and never fail to thoroughly bore with crude caricatures of strutting macho bullshit. In my mind, u0026#39;Aliensu0026#39; was the only movie to successfully make such a transition, due to James Cameronu0026#39;s talent, not simply for directing the best action sequences around, but never forgetting that an audience has to care about the people being butchered. He was also ably assisted by some genuinely talented actors. With u0026#39;The Hills have Eyes 2u0026#39;, itu0026#39;s clear that video director Martin Weisz is no James Cameron, and the cast of television bit-parters havenu0026#39;t the talent or even the inclination to turn their cardboard cutout characters into anything approaching living, breathing human beings.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eNeedless to say, every character is a broad and generic cliché. They act in dumb and illogical ways, making dumb and illogical decisions that lead them to predictably dumb and illogical deaths. The latter half of the movie becomes just another tedious chased-through-dark-corridors scenario. u0026#39;The Descentu0026#39; (on which Sam McCurdy, coincidentally, also worked as cinematography) proved that even this most derivative of sequences can still be carried out with genuine originality and suspense, but we see no such innovation here.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eu0026#39;The Hills Have Eyes 2u0026#39; is just a very lazy movie, devoid of any suspense, tension, or surprise, with not a single individual involved remotely interested in producing anything of quality. Itu0026#39;s a tame and tired excuse for a sequel and deserves to spend the rest of its life in a Blockbusteru0026#39;s bargain bin.”