The Hills Have Eyes II

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.