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The Hills Have Eyes II (2007)

Director: Martin Weisz

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Synopsis

In this sequel to the horror remake, a group of young National Guard trainees are assigned to deliver vital equipment to military scientists at an isolated outpost in the New Mexico desert. There they find an abandoned camp and when they hear a distress call, the recruits set off on a seemingly routine rescue mission. The trainees are then put to the ultimate survival test when they come across ravenous mutants in the desert hills.

Movie review

From Time Out London

A hateful, sadistic and boring sequel to Alexandre Aja’s 2005 remake, this bears little relation to the French director’s visually inventive re-working – nor indeed to Wes Craven’s lazy 1985 follow-up to his own cult original. Here, an inexperienced National Guard Unit delivering supplies to the Section 16 military facility arrives to find the place deserted. Then it’s mirror, signal, manoeuvre, as flashes from the hillside lure the part-time soldiers into traps set by mutant cannibal caveman Papa Hades (Michael Bailey Smith) and his two bastard off-spring, Chameleon and Hansel. Lacking the genre-steeped intelligence of Grégory Levasseur’s screenplay for the Aja film, the killing-by-numbers script from producer Wes Craven and his son Jonathan presents German director Martin Weisz with few opportunities for suspense or scares. Weisz prefers a single-minded pursuit of ugly set-pieces and repellent sexual violence. Weisz’ first feature was ‘Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story’, a banal study of a real-life cannibal killer. Like this sorry sequel, it amounted to far less than the sum of its body parts.

Author: Nigel Floyd

Time Out London Issue 1910: March 28-April 3 2007

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