The Hills Have Eyes Part 2

The original The Hills Have Eyes was a grueling experience in desolate survival horror, featuring an inbred clan of desert-dwelling uglies who lived beyond the confines of civilization on a nuclear test range, a desert badlands that an unsuspecting family—Mom, Dad, Sis, husband, dog, baby bro, etc.—wander into unknowingly.

It's intense, and, barring the fact that the inbred cannibals, who meditate on whether or not to “eat the baby,” as “baby is fat and juicy...good meat,” don’t look as if they've missed any meals and all have perfect teeth, it still manages to throw barbarism against bourgeois American middle-class civilization for a side-by-side comparison of what happens to the civilized when they are stalked by monsters.

(Sam Raimi has said that, when he first saw THHE, he was inwardly imploring the Sawney Beane clan of the atomic test range to, “Eat the baby! Please! Don’t raise it as one of your own.” Sam felt that cannibalizing the helpless infant would be far preferable and more humane a fate than having it grow up combing the baked and cracked earth in search of two-legged prey.)

The Hills Have Eyes II (1985) Trailer Full HD

The film is a cult classic, picking up a similar theme from the late Wes Craven’s groundbreaking, eponymous effort, the seminal shocker of the Seventies, Last House on the Left (1972). That film featured old-school menacing killers instead of vaguely mutant cannibals—emphasizing the amoral and psychopathic but still undeniably “civilized”—as opposed to a fur-clad, pseudo-savage clan of flesh-rippers.

But, alas, as far as Craven’s oeuvre goes, THHE Part 2 is a helluva threadbare, letdown sequel, comprised of a lot of footage from the original film.

Bobby (Robert Houston), survivor of the first film, is seeing a psychiatrist, who encourages him and Rachel (formerly “Ruby,” of the cannibal clan) to take the off-road dirtbike team for which they’ve invented rocket fuel out to the same test range where his family was slaughtered in the first film. Seems like a good idea, don’t you agree?

Rachel (Janus Blythe) goes in his stead after a rather healthy selection of scenes from the first film (it also opens like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1 and 2, with gripping narration over scrolling titles), and their bus breaks down in an abandoned mining camp, and everyone decides to don their off-road racing helmets and uniforms and go dirtbiking around. Except for the somewhat stereotyped Black couple (Willard E. Pugh and Penny Johnson), the vaguely Jewish (okay, at least ethnic) guy, and the blind girl, Cass (Tamara Stafford).

The whole cannibal crew has been reduced to Pluto (Michael Berryman) and The Reaper (John Bloom). I seem to remember Pluto being killed in the first film, and also the first film ending differently than what is suggested here—but it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. (Wiki, no doubt.)

Okay.

The film is partly Friday the Thirteenth-level stalk-and-slash, but the assembled “tweens” here seem extra clueless. Michael Berryman and The Reaper are an interesting pairing, but, on the whole, the film feels, as I noted before, threadbare, incomplete, sparse, unnecessary. A raw, exploitative cash-in on the cult success from 1977. Why does this picture exist? It’s like the sentence that follows a semicolon. There is not a lot of story here, and none of it seems convincing at all.

There is a lot of violent action, but not a lot of real gruesomeness to placate the hardcore horror and splatter buffs. It doesn’t demand any serious attention and doesn’t stick to your cinematic ribs in any case.

The Misfits, one of my all-time favorite punk rock bands, referenced The Hills Have Eyes in their song “Earth A.D.” That song was a testament to the true horror unleashed by the first gripping, electrifying film. Here, the hills may very well have eyes, but the viewer might, however, find his or her eyes—and attention—wandering.

Written and directed by the late, great Wes Craven. RIP

THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II | Wes Craven's Slasher Legend Returns | 1980s Horror Full Movie HD

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