I would say “The Hills Have Eyes II” is a pleasant surprise, although “pleasant” is not a word that comes into mind while watching this disturbing horror picture. Nevertheless, it’s not half bad.
It’s a sequel to last year’s hit remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 original. Although we are revisiting the same desert locale, riddled with caves hiding mutants, this movie doesn’t have much to do with the last one.
In fact, horror maestro Craven – who wrote the script here with his son, Jonathan – has tried something chancier. Hold on to your hats, but “The Hills Have Eyes II” is an Iraq War platoon movie, disguised as a horror flick.
Now, the film is still set in the same mysterious area in the southwestern United States, but there’s no mistaking the idea here. After an especially gruesome prologue involving a mutant birth, there’s a sequence of Gulf War combat, which is then revealed to be a training exercise for a National Guard platoon. They’re in New Mexico, but everything visual about the movie – terrain, uniforms, caves – reads as the Middle East.
The unit is sent on a routine assignment to deliver equipment to a scientific study in the forbidden zone, which quickly turns into a battle against the mutants in the hills. Because the hills have eyes. And cleavers. And spears.
The film might actually disappoint the opening-weekend crowd that comes to horror movies these days, because after the opening blast it settles into a more old-fashioned kind of suspense: the platoon moving through the hills and into the caves below, getting picked off one by one.
When violence does happen (and yes, gore fans, there’s flying blood and spilling entrails), it’s more disturbing, because we’ve started to root for the confused soldiers. Some of them are likable actors, even if nobody’s from the A-list, with Michael McMillian leading the cast as an anti-war back-talker.
German-born director Martin Weisz keeps it moving, effectively using the chaos of the hidden enemy. A scene of “friendly fire” is especially shocking.
Elsewhere, the movie stumbles with some familiar bugaboos of the recent horror crop: gratuitous violence, the need to out-gross the last movie, clumsy acting and dialogue. Still, it’s better than the other “Hills Have Eyes” movies, and it proves Wes Craven has a few ideas left.
‘The Hills Have Eyes II’
This sequel has some of the bugaboos of recent horror movies, including clumsy acting and gratuitous violence, but it’s better than expected. A National Guard unit gets lost in the mutant-filled forbidden zone, which makes the movie read as a Middle Eastern war film rather than a slasher flick.
R rating is for violence, language, nudity.
Now showing: Alderwood, Everett, Monroe, Marysville, Mountlake, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Varsity, Woodinville, Cascade Mall
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