The Hills Have Eyes 2 - You’ve seen one set of mutated cannibal hillbillies then you’ve seen them all

Yes, I hate lazy horror remakes as much as the next fan of the genre.  However, when it came to the (‘original’) remake of the Hills Have Eyes, I was actually pretty impressed.  I guess I wasn’t the only one as it seems to have spawned a sequel… which I also watched.

I guess you could compare part 2 to ‘Aliens’ and part 1 to ‘Alien.’ Of course the major difference was that BOTH ‘Alien’ films were awesome whereas here, just adding soldiers and guns doesn’t automatically make it better.  The first film showed us what happened to a family when their camper van broke down in the middle of a desert and ended up at odds with the psychotic locals.  Now, some time later in the same desert, a team of young – and not that particularly experienced – soldiers are on a training exercise.  Guess what happens to them?!

So our young recruits start getting attacked and picked off one by one in classic slasher style.  You may think the fact that they’re armed with guns and the locals have melee weapons gives them an advantage.  It doesn’t.  Like I say they’re VERY inexperienced, almost to the point of it being a little unrealistic how quickly they go down.  However, part of the story is that they’re not that good at what they do, so I guess I can let that one slide.  Unfortunately, part of the problem with having all the characters dressed the same in their army gear makes them very difficult to tell who’s who – especially when one dies and then you realise it was a different soldier.  Not only this, they’re all rather forgettable and you can hazard a guess which handful will make it all the way to the final reel as they’re the only ones with vaguely identifiable character traits.

Sadly, it’s not just the people we’re supposed to root for who have problems (dare I call them ‘heroes?’).  The mutated rednecks are just as bland.  They’re not that scary and the make-up and gore isn’t up to the standards it would need to be to really stand out.  There’s a bit of gore and some nastiness here and there, but – again – nothing that you haven’t seen before (and better!) if you’ve seen much of the horror genre.

I may sound like I hated it, but I didn’t.  The problem is that it’s just the very definition of ‘average.’ It’s not bad, just completely forgettable.  There are too many horror clichés in here to really make it work well and it’s not a patch on either of the originals.  Plus, if I have to hear someone say either ‘We’re going to get through this’ (or a variation thereof) I may just hurl the remote at the TV screen.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back