The story is about as simple as it comes.  In the wake of the Carter Family Massacre, the U.S. Government has cordoned off the 1600 square miles of New Mexico desert and systematically ordered search and destroy missions to eradicate the mutant cannibal problem once and for all.  For reasons unknown (that’s what they state, and we never really do get an explanation other than the fact that it runs with the premise) the government has set up an electronic monitoring system.  A group of National Guard trainees are sent to re-supply one of the teams setting up the monitoring system, and find that the scientists have disappeared.  After catching a garbled radio message and seeing a signal mirror in the distance, they go off on a search and rescue mission.  And of course they’re besieged by everyone’s favorite mutant cannibals that don’t live in Texas.  And, really, that’s about it.

But that’s not really a bad thing.

Scripted by Wes Craven and his son Jonathan, The Hills Have Eyes II has a tone that is definitive Craven.  It’s tense, it’s claustrophobic, and it is fucking brutal.  The hill people are portrayed as frighteningly intelligent, unlike other films of a similar ilk, setting up traps and stalking their prey more like pack hunting animals than the psychotic rednecks we’ve become used to.  The soldiers take a drastically different approach than people from similar films; when they’re hit, they go on the offensive, actively looking to take out their enemies and doing so with ruthless efficiency.

And once again, KNB proved itself a company that could do no wrong as it’s occasionally over the top gore and mutant makeup take center stage.  Limbs are hacked off, people are forced through rocky holes a foot in diameter, breaking every bone along the way, they’re shot, stabbed, crushed and beaten in amazingly grisly and often original manners.  If there’s any gripes about this, it’s the occasional over-usage of CGI (particularly in the scenes involving people falling off cliffs), and the fact that unlike the first movie, the mutant design of this movie clearly has little relation to real mutation and more with what looks cool.

And there’s a guy who looks like Sloth from The Goonies, but that’s neither here nor there.

Additionally, there are a lot of little things that take the film down from the great movie that it could have been, while there’s others that are just flat out frustrating.

The characters, on both sides, are pretty thin, even for horror movies.  The soldiers are mostly cardboard cutouts (the pacifist, the tough sergeant, the Rambo wannabe, the tough nice guy, the Latina, etc.), while the mutants for the most part are just crazy guys with lumpy heads.  Very little development is given to either side, with the soldiers mostly screaming a whole bunch while the mutants look scary for a few minutes before getting killed.

Additionally, this film has more than it’s fair share of plot holes.  I’m not even talking about the excusable kind, I’m talking about the kind that just grab you by the neck and make you go, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding!”  I mean, people tend to be pretty durable in horror movies, but when a guy has been brutally been impaled and chucked off an eighty foot cliff, he’s not going to get up afterwards and deliver a long speech before shooting himself in the head.  That’s just not how the human body works.  And then there’s one really insulting bit…

All right, I’m not usually one who minds spoiler warnings, but this one is pretty big and pretty bad so I wanted to just share it.  If you’re not into spoilers, yadda yadda yadda just skip this next paragraph.  The soldiers have already lost a few of their team.  They know the mutants want their women for raping and breeding.  They set up a trap using the women that lures a hill person out into the open, and then they brutally murder him.  Good stuff, right?  Then one of the women goes off into the distance, ON HER OWN, to use the bathroom.  Then she gets kidnapped, and gets the eventual raping.  Everyone seems surprised by this.  Why didn’t she just go in front of them?  They proved themselves smart and capable soldiers until then, and after that, wow, they even manage to get stupider.

The cannibal aspect of the hill people is even made more vague by the fact that the hill people seem to be just as satisfied torturing and brutally murdering people moreso than eating them.

Lastly, there’s one more element I’d like to discuss: the brutality.  The Hills Have Eyes was so shocking because of it’s shocking and out of nowhere brutality.  However, this time we know it’s coming, and this time they knew it’s coming, so the filmmakers decided to go over the top throughout, and though often it works, there’s often times it goes beyond the realm of good taste.  The opening for example, involves a naked woman strapped to a bed and graphically giving birth to a hill person that is ripped from between her legs rather explicitly by the lead hill person Hades.  I mean, it’s assumed that this is what the hill people do, and they do mention it later, but showing it explicitly and full frontal… that more or less begins to step over the line of scary and into the line of flat out bad taste.  Considering how out of place it is with the rest of the movie, it almost acts as a turnoff from the very first moments of the film.

Look, I know I spent a lot of time trashing The Hills Have Eyes II, and I really don’t mean for it to sound that way.  It’s a film that is pure Craven, is very stylishly done and every bit as brutal as it wants to be.  The original The Hills Have Eyes is a classic because you cared about the people these horrible things were happening to.  Here, it’s mostly just a bunch of random people shooting, killing and eating each other.  While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it doesn’t make it a very unique film.  Here’s hoping for better luck with The Hills Have Eyes III.