Speaking of Wes Craven...

I also recently watched the sequel to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes - The Hills Have Eyes II, not to be confused as a remake of the original The Hills Have Eyes Part II, the sequel to the original The Hills Have Eyes.

I didn't like the original The Hills Have Eyes, but the remake directed by Alexandre Aja was actually pretty good. When the sequel of the remake was in theaters, The Movie Channel, Showtime's retarded little brother network, was playing the original The Hills Have Eyes Part II, so I watched it. It is, quite simply, one of the worst movies ever made.

Consider this: after the success of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven opted to make a sequel for The Hills Have Eyes instead of the sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street. That's like finding a gold mine and deciding to go farm pig shit for a living. Lucky for him, he got plenty of second (and third and fourth) chances - for example, he wrote A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3 (which was really the only good Nightmare sequel until he made New Nightmare.)

The original Hills Have Eyes Part II is about a bunch of dirt bike racers in the desert getting attacked by the left over "mutants" from the first movie - of which there were, I think, two. One was Michael Berryman, the other was "The Reaper," who was not in the original movie and was really kind of a stand in for Papa Jupiter, the father of the mutants from the first movie, who was done blowed up so good that there was no way they could really bring the character back. In addition to that, since the original was made in 1977 and home video was still pretty new in 1985, they had to show the audience some of the things that happened in the original via flashback. Every character that was in the original has flashbacks, including the dog. I'm not joking. I am 110% serious. This movie does indeed include a dog having flashbacks to the previous movie. Wow. Just. Wow.

Now, in the original Hills Have Eyes movies, the "mutants," aren't really mutants, they're more like cannibalistic hillbillies. Michael Berryman looks a little weird, but not mutant weird, and the rest of them were just dirty bearded people. So think of the original Hills Have Eyes as Deliverance in the desert without any real message aside from "non-violent liberal nerdy guys will totally go apeshit on your ass if you kill their wife, half their family and kidnap their infant."

The remake of The Hills Have Eyes started out right by having the mutants be honest-to-god mutants. Overall it was a decent horror movie, and at the end implied that there was an entire underground village of mutants living in the desert. It also played up the idea that the area was a nuclear test site by having a giant crater as well as a fake town that the mutants lived in. Overall better mutants, better gore, better cinematography, better direction = better movie. Wes Craven produced the remake, but did not direct or write the new script.

So of course, when that did well, they had to make a cash in sequel. This time the script was written by Wes Craven and his son Jonathan. Instead of dirt bike racers, we get National Guard soldiers. Now, I'm no expert on the military or the National Guard, but right off the bat, I got the sneaking suspicion that the writers had no idea what the National Guard was really like and didn't bother to ask anybody.

The movie opens in what appears to be a firefight in the streets of some middle eastern country, but it turns out to be a training exercise - complete with live grenades. Oooohkay! The recruits fail the test, apparently being the 12 or so worst recruits in the entire national guard (maybe they were hoping they'd blow themselves up with those live grenades?) so they're being sent back to base, but first it turns out they have to get some equipment to some scientists in a part of the desert that used to be a nuclear blast zone. Hooray!

So the group, through a series of mishaps mostly due to their own incompetence, gets whittled down to about 3 survivors, and they're battling against a measly four mutants - Rocky, Blindy, Nicey the Helpful Retard, and Rapey McRaperton. Four mutants is a huge letdown after the last movie set up the idea that their could possibly be an entire town of underground mutants. Furthermore, in the remake, Alexandre Aja and his crew used subtle CGI to enhance the latex prosthetics on his mutants, this movie just sticks to latex and it looks like crap.

So yeah, Hills Have Eyes movies, I don't really like them, but I watched them all anyway.

I watched this on purpose.