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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/23/07)

This is a sequel to last year's remake of the 1977 grindhouse, um, classic. What it is not is a remake of the 1985 sequel to the 1977 grindhouse, um, classic, which was titled — important distinction here — The Hills Have Eyes Part II. (You know, it occurred to me as I was mentally constructing this notice that the explication of what this movie actually was would be more involved than the critique would end up being. Let's see how that works out.) Now the 1985 movie, having been conceived and made almost a decade after the original, didn't quite take up where the original left off — that is, with a near-wiped-out "normal" family reduced to the same level of brutality as that of the nuke-mutated family that attacked them out in the desert — but it did reintroduce some familiar characters, including Michael Berryman's ever-memorable Pluto. And it did introduce some narrative innovations, in that it features a dog having a flashback.

This Hills putatively picks up shortly after the 2006 shocker, although we're not apprised of what happened to the "normal" survivors in that one. Did they seek counseling? Settle in the area? We don't know, and why should we know, because we don't care. Just as here we don't care about the argumentative group of National Guard trainees who get sent out to the mountains and mines of the previous film, which are now being monitored by army scientists. Or at least they're supposed to be. Well, they were being monitored by army scientists, until the mountain-and-mine-dwelling mutants disemboweled and tortured and ugh-ick-yuck-bleched them all.

The raw recruits snipe witlessly at each other. "Peace ass shit boy," spits one; "Sorry, I didn't know I was dealing with Rambo resurrected," sniffs the other. And, in the time-honored manner of movie characters who've never seen a horror movie themselves, they are suitably befuddled to come upon a base camp with no inhabitants in sight, malfunctioning radio equipment, and the other possible indicators of mountain-and-mine-dwelling mutant activity. The "scare ride"/atrocity exhibition that occupies the rest of the picture's running time kicks off with a novelty of sorts — a still-living victim fished out of a Port-a-Potty who shortly thereafter dies from fecal-matter infections. Ugh-ick-yuck-blech, for sure.

From then on things are fairly rote and crass, with the troop's struggle to survive given an extra frisson (or so director Weisz, working from a script by Craven and his son Jonathan, dearly hopes) by the not-quite-revelation that if the women therein are captured, they'll be used by the mountain-and-mine-dwelling mutants for breeding. That "if" of course becomes a "when" for one character, at which point rape (complete with really disgusting mountain-and-mine-dwelling-mutant drool) becomes part of the movie's ugh-ick-yuck-bleching repertoire.

Fox Atomic didn't screen this movie for critics; a (very nice) publicist I spoke to cited "the atmosphere for horror movies these days." As a fan of the genre, and someone who genuinely loves such recent horror efforts as The Descent and The Host, I respectfully suggest that the atmosphere for horror movies might be better if moviemakers stopped making ones like this.

— Glenn Kenny