THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2

A group of National Guard recruits is sent to Sector 16, a desert area in New Mexico where, during the 1950s, the U.S. Army conducted experiments on the effects of nuclear radiation. The young soldiers' task is simple: supply a research team with scientific equipment. But upon arrival, there is no trace of the researchers, and instead, a distress call comes from a walkie-talkie found on the spot. The recruits immediately begin searching for the scientists, but the suspicion that it is actually a trap soon becomes certain when the young soldiers realize that someone lives among the hills, and they are hungry! Last year, Alexandre Aja (High Tension) brought back to the big screen an old cult film directed by Wes Craven, "The Hills Have Eyes," with great public and critical success. With the idea of striking while the iron is hot, producers Wes Craven and Peter Locke did not waste any time, immediately putting a sequel to Aja's film into production. Once again, a director was chosen among the young promising European talents, and the choice fell on the German Martin Weisz, already the creator in 2005 of another cannibal movie, "Grimm Love." However, the miracle performed by Aja was not repeated, and the film received lukewarm receptions at the box office, probably dictated by a market now saturated with products of the same kind. It must be made clear immediately that "The Hills Have Eyes 2" version 2007 is not the remake of the film with the same title that Wes Craven directed in 1985, but rather a completely new film that directly connects to the events narrated in Aja's film. This "The Hills Have Eyes 2" demonstrates that it perfectly follows the "manual" characteristics that sequels of a horror saga should possess, the same that Craven himself had fun making known and deconstructed in his "Scream 2;" hence, there will be more deaths, a more substantial presence of gore, more action, a greater dose of scares, and a sort of invulnerability of the boogeymen of the moment. All of this is perfectly respected, and Weisz's film shows itself to be a fast cauldron of action and atrocities that has its most visible limit in a screenplay (written by Wes Craven himself in collaboration with his son Jonathan) clearly rushed and far too minimal, aimed at the economy of narrative development. The idea of carrying out the film in real-time is certainly a correct choice, capable of creating greater pathos in the spectator and making the sequence of events more unpredictable, as well as the malsanely fascinating idea that drives the mutants to kidnap the women of the group; all of this, however, concentrated in just ninety minutes, resolves itself as a slasher where the most important thing is the spectacularization of death and the autopsy search for the disturbing detail. All of this leads us to consider "The Hills Have Eyes 2" as pure entertainment, leisure cinema aimed at satisfying the spectator's thirst for blood and capable of making them spend an hour and a half of sure fun; in this, "The Hills Have Eyes 2" is certainly an honest product: it gives the spectator exactly what it promises, without any intellectual or political-social frills. Indeed, here where the 1977 Craven film pushed the pedal on the explicit criticism of American society and Aja's film claimed to deepen the political aspect hidden between the lines since the prototype, in this new variant signed Weisz, the specter of a criticism directed at the current American government is entirely optional: if one wishes, one can undertake a fantastic sociological reading that wants to deepen the obtuse behavior of an army so busy fighting an external enemy that it does not notice harboring a serpent in its bosom, but any metaphorical reading, in the opinion of the writer, would perhaps be excessively forced. The wisest thing to fully enjoy "The Hills Have Eyes 2" is to abandon oneself to the giant circus of splatter violence and genetic malformations that compose it, and only then will it be possible to notice how this film is a perfect synthesis of two well-distinct cinematic eras: the lightness and camp goliardy of the 1980s slasher cinema and the very modern fashion of taking any situation of violence to the extreme, showing pain and anatomical detail in all its crude exaggeration. Inferior to Aja's film, but extremely enjoyable if you are looking for a pure entertainment movie.