That gag reflex is a funny thing. You can see entrails, body parts, mutants devouring people and the like, and be fine.
But let a freak jam his 22-inch purple tongue down a starlet’s throat, and I’m just grateful I skipped the popcorn today.
That comes long before a grisly, graphic rape in “The Hills Have Eyes 2,” a horror film so hackneyed and loathsome that it can claim no redeeming social value at all. We watch a squad of nine inept National Guardsmen (and women) hunted down by the same cave-dwelling atomic mutants that Wes Craven first showed us in the 1970s.
“Aw man, we’re gonna get picked off, one by one,” one underpaid actor mutters, stating the obvious and showing he’s seen this movie before. As have we all.
There’s not much new to this sequel to last year’s remake of the Craven original. The moral to the story – that the government has kept secrets it shouldn’t, has misused some of its people and much of the land – is the same. The add-on message – that the military isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that we don’t have to go halfway around the world to put citizen soldiers in danger – must have had Craven and his co-writer son, Jonathan, giggling at their cleverness.
The “liberal” (Michael McMillian) preaches reason and a measured response to the horrors that suddenly befall the crew-in-training he’s with. The Latino-psycho (Jacob Vargas) won’t hear that. Let’s pull the trigger. What’s the matter, are you scared? “It’s not about scared. It’s about not making idiotic and possibly fatal decisions.” This is America. We know which point of view will win.
But neither extreme is prepared for the death-dealing boogeymen who just won’t die.
It’s not scary, not novel. They never pay these people, especially the women, enough, for what they’re put through on the screen.
Tongues, rapes, spiders, scripts by relatives of the real screenwriter, no-name directors …
The only frightening thing about this monstrosity about subhuman mutants breeding and punishing the institutions and society that made them is that the Cravens were breeding too. Another generation may have to suffer – a generation of moviegoers.
“The Hills Have Eyes 2” | 1/2 * RATING
R for prolonged scenes of gruesome horror violence and gore, a rape and language | 1 hour, 29 minutes | HORROR | Directed by Martin Weisz; starring Michael McMillian, Jessica Stroup, Flex Alexander, Lee Thompson Young, Daniella Alonso, Jacob Vargas. | Playing at area theaters.
