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With last years The Hills Have Eyes remake a surprise success, Wes Craven desperately appears to be hoping for another teen Scream franchise to put him back on the list of top macabre maestros.  Yet trotting out the script for this sequel in just a month, with his son Jonathan as co-writer, has meant that this frolic back to the land of mutated cannibals contains less meat on its bones than Paris Hilton after a piranha feeding frenzy and the films equally vacuous shop-dummy protagonists stumbling around in the desert make this about as interesting.

Craven seeks to up the body count of the original by taking the Aliens route; hey, let's make them beefed-up soldiers with guns.  So a bunch or raw recruits are given a straightforward mission to deliver supplies to a scientific outpost in top secret 'sector 16' but upon arriving at the camp they find it deserted.  Thus begins a fight for survival as the grunts have to avoid being dismembered in various horrifying ways and get down the hillside it took them 10 minutes to sprint up.  They're forced into a network of caves riddled by vicious mutants who largely look like a bunch of pissed-off relations to Sloth from The Goonies and this forms the tenuous "isn't it like the war in Afghanistan" theme.  All keen to see action, they're given the ideal opportunity to exercise those itchy trigger fingers and gun down whatever gets in their way including their helpless instructor.  Yes, this is Americans being as meatheaded as possible, some live, some don't and perhaps it would be watchable if any of these teen pin-ups in combats had an opinion other than the "they're picking us off" revelation when there are just a handful of them left. 

The original saw wholesome family members turn into savages to protect themselves and survive the horrifying detritus left behind by the unstoppable American Dream.  In Hills 2 the closest approximation is pacifist Napoleon (McMillian) who questions authority and government decisions, although quite why he thought a career in the army would be a good idea is anyone's guess, and events force him to take up arms in order to save his squad.  However, after he's battered his first mutant's head in with a rock Napoleon quickly becomes forgotten about and this is indicative of a movie that only serves to string together several violent scenes, each trying to outdo the last in terms of the wince-factor.  This culminates in a monstrous rape, after all that's what drove sales of the remake's Uncut edition, and continues a worrying trend of including such an abhorrent crime as a means to shock in absence of anything imaginative.  With no context it's only purpose is to fuel the audience's catharsis when the good guys get to beat-up on the big bad boss mutant, Papa Hades, in a more sustained attack in the film's blunt and sadistic finale.

With the story revealing nothing, it's bookended by dated X-Files gibberish about a government cover-up and electrical signals, Hills 2 whiffs of a rush job in order to keep the series ticking over for another year until someone comes up with a decent idea.  The trailer, which must have been for another movie, was an impressive exercise in creating expectation, mood and, more importantly, fear, but it appears music director Weisz thinks wishboning a guy as he's dragged through a hole or splattering people across rocks is more a more effective way to terrify audiences.  Those examples may warrant a passing glance by starving gorehounds but they'd have to be ravenous to swallow the rest of the predictable plotting and lazy execution.  What extra bits are we to expect come its release on DVD?  The Hills Have Eyes 2: Plot Edition?