The Hills Have Eyes 2 (1985 version)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (1985 version)

“The boogeyman's dead,” a psychiatrist assures Bobby Carter (one of the survivors from the first Hills Have Eyes) seven minutes into the sequel. Bobby, still traumatized from the ordeal he endured eight years earlier, has an intense fear of the desert and opts to not accompany a team of motorbike racers there even though they'll be testing out a new form of fuel that he formulated. As the film opens on a closeup of Bobby, I assumed that he would be the protagonist this time around, but his role turns out to be little more than a cameo. Indeed, there is no clear lead character in The Hills Have Eyes 2, and that's one of the project's many flaws.

Whereas the first film was steeped in realism, Hills 2 (written and directed by Wes Craven) requires serious suspension of disbelief almost from the get-go. Early on, the viewer learns that Bobby's wife is Ruby (from the first film's family of savages), only now she calls herself Rachel and masquerades as a civilized woman. By a massive coincidence, the racing team that's going to test Bobby's fuel must attend an event in the desert not far from where the original film took place. Ruby accompanies the team on a bus and (twenty-one minutes into the story) agrees without much protest when the group opts to veer off the paved road on a shortcut that will lead right to her old stomping grounds. Beast (one of the dogs from part one) goes on this trip too. The bus traverses rough terrain, and jagged rocks puncture its fuel tank, thereby stranding the group (conveniently close to a seemingly abandoned property that Ruby and the bikers explore in search of gasoline). Naturally, Pluto (Ruby's brother from part one) appears and attacks his sister, then scampers off into the desert. At the thirty-five minute mark, “Rachel” confesses to the others that she is in fact Ruby from the legendary family of desert cannibals. Nobody freaks out. Pluto steals one of the motorbikes, and two of the guys (Harry and Roy) pursue him. The first death occurs fully forty-two minutes in (nearly at the midpoint) when a large rock falls and crushes Harry. Four minutes later, Roy (on his bike) ends up ensnared in a net (Pluto and his ally this time around, a gigantic fellow known as The Reaper, have developed a knack for constructing elaborate traps). Cut to nightfall. In the second half of the film, the deaths occur one after another swiftly. One fellow takes a massive spear to the chest, and seven minutes later a dude named Foster gets pulled under the bus and axed in the head. Four minutes later, The Reaper crushes a girl named Jane in his arms. Within a minute, he slits the throat of another gal (Sue). Four minutes later, Pluto plummets to his death. Ruby's fate is unclear, for around this time she hits her head on a rock and is never seen again. The only memorable and singular character (a young blind woman named Cass) fills the “final girl” role and (with the help of another survivor) outwits The Reaper in a harrowing (if unbelievable) denouement.

In a 1985 interview with Kim Newman, Wes Craven explained that the film that reached audiences did not reflect his artistic vision: “It was not intended to be released as it was. It was not completed, and I had an agreement that when we'd finished the initial shoot the producers would cut it together and we'd see what we needed. Then we'd go shoot for another five or six days. That was agreed upon but... suddenly they were acting as if that was the finished film... The whole thing is unfinished. I wasn't satisfied with the whole ending. There were a couple of main sequences in the center of the film that didn't quite work. And the whole opening needed to be shortened drastically.”

Craven articulates additional reasons for the project's flaws in this quotation from Brian J. Robb's book Screams & Nightmares: “It was a much better script, I think, than the movie turned out to be... It was very underfunded. The movie was originally budgeted on the first draft of the script, and the producers said they thought it should be expanded, so I wrote a much better and bigger script, but the budget stayed the same.”

Critics have savaged the film. A review in Variety states that Hills 2 is filled with “dull, formula terror pic cliches, with one attractive teenager after another picked off...” In his book about Craven, John Wooley opines that “the biggest disappointment about Hills 2 is the sense of detachment from what's happening on the screen, an air of unreality and not the good kind of unreality.” The Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror concludes, “This perfunctory sequel drops the thematic drive of pitting two mirror-image families against each other and rehashes the uninteresting Friday the 13^th strategy of isolating a group of teenagers in a rural locale and killing them one by one.” The comparison to Friday the 13^th is particularly apt given that Harry Manfredini composed the scores for many of the films in that franchise in addition to scoring Hills 2. Also, Kane Hodder (who would go on to play Jason Voorhees in 1988's Friday the 13^th part 7) performed stunts in Hills 2.

A serious missed opportunity to tell another gripping tale of primal survival, The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a curious footnote in Wes Craven's oeuvre – a critically-reviled movie peppered with bits of clever dialogue (“It ain't natural to be in a place without a disco,” says Foster when talking about being in the desert). The only film in history in which a dog's memory appears as a flashback scene (Beast recalls the time in part one when he nearly killed Pluto by tearing the savage's throat out), Hills 2 is as derivative as part one was innovative. This project really does feel like a sub-par eighties slasher film, whereas part one pushed the envelope and enthralled audiences upon its release in 1977. Unless you're a Craven completist, avoid The Hills Have Eyes 2.