The Hills Have Eyes 2  ★★½

FATHER and son writing team Wes and Jonathan Craven dropped the ball in 2007 with The Hills Have Eyes 2.

The original 1977 film, written and directed by Wes Craven, is a minor classic of the horror genre. The 2006 remake, written by Wes and directed by Frenchman Alexandre Aja, was a pretty good attempt to recreate the combination of twisted atmosphere, gory shocks and social commentary.

But The Hills Have Eyes 2 suffers in comparison to both previous films. While German director Martin Weisz does a reasonable job, he is hampered by a lazy, uneventful script and some below average performances in key roles.

The film has suitably grotesque moments and some moments of tension but, without the required audience involvement in the characters and their predicament, they end up being in service of shock value only.

Following the premise of the original film, the Cravens seek to suggest in their script that bloodthirsty mutants are also worthy of our understanding and sympathies, but include very little material that can illicit this reaction.

A prologue has a screaming woman lying chained in filthy conditions giving birth. When a mutant realises the baby is stillborn, he kills the mother.

We then cut to the location of the previous films – a former nuclear weapons testing area in the New Mexico desert. A small group of scientists protected by Army are in the process of installing a surveillance system when they are attacked by members of a mutant cannibal community still living in the area.

A group of rookie National Guardsmen arrive to resupply the scientists and embark on a training mission. They find the base camp abandoned and decide to follow what appears to be a distress call up in the surrounding mountains. Before long our trainee soldiers are fighting for their lives.

I realise they are meant to be trainees but some of the decisions made by these part-time soldiers are ridiculous and purely in service of the plot, taking audiences even more out of the story and impacting attempts to increase suspense.

I suspect there is a good reason why we haven’t seen another film in this series. At least we have the original and remake to enjoy.