THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1985)

Streaming on Tubi!
Directed/Written by Wes Craven
Starring Tamara Stafford, Kevin Spirtas, John Bloom, Michael Berryman, Janus Blythe, Robert Houston

In the intro of Wes Craven’s follow up to his highly successful and critically acclaimed THE HILLS HAVE EYES, they mentioned that “The hills still had eyes!” which I think would have been a much cooler title. Not sure why I started out this review with that, but for some reason that’s the first thing that entered my head as I sat down to write. I guess that’s better than leading off with the acknowledgement that THE HILLS HAVE THIGHS is a pretty hilarious name for a porno that I didn’t not not not see on Skinemax an age ago.

I guess my interest in rejiggering the name of the film speaks to how much I wanted to like THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2. It does have a lot of things going for it. Even though it was made 8 years after the original, returning to the project is writer/director Wes Craven, who had just finished A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET a year earlier. Robert Houston and Janus Blythe, as well as Michael Berryman return too. Henry Manfredini lends his fluttering keyboard fingers for the score. Hell, it even worked out so that clips of the original were able to be used in this sequel. Despite all of that, though, the film itself can’t recapture the magic of the original. I don’t want to call THHE2 a complete dud, but for many reasons, the film just doesn’t stack up to the original despite all of the returning factors.

Gone is Craven’s multi-textural dissection of the modern nuclear family that was so prevalent in the first film. In part two, it’s a group of motorbike riders who get stranded in the middle of the desert after taking a shortcut through a dangerous nuclear test site. Anyone who saw the first film knows that this is a no-no as two of the surviving killers from the first film, Michael Berryman’s gaunt skinhead Pluto and John Bloom’s Neanderthal-like Reaper, stalk and kill the bikers in a fashion that was tried and true even at the time of this film’s release. This film seemed much more like a cash grab (something I’d be more willing to accept from Craven now, than back then when he actually had some horrific themes he wanted to explore and the gumption to do it effectively and riskily). Though THE HILLS HAVE EYES wasn’t getting any acting awards, years later, Craven didn’t get is cast to try so hard here either. The menace of the original family is kind of reduced to Pluto calling Beast (another returning character from part one, this one, a dog) a snot-licker before being knocked off a cliff to his death and the Reaper just growling and body slamming folks to death.

The film is heavily reliant on flashbacks. Heavily. Many of the most effective scenes from the first film are shown again through dreams and flashbacks from Bobby (Robert Huston who was a survivor from the first film) and Ruby (the young female from the family of killers who now is older and domesticated, played again by Janus Blythe). In the most unintentionally funny moment of the film, even the dog Beast has his own flashback sequence! When the pooch begins the squiggly screen, it’s past the point of parody.

In many ways, this feels like a Wes Craven directed FRIDAY THE 13TH film as he goes through the motions that were well mapped out in those films by the time this one came out. It doesn’t help that Henry Manfredini’s score is almost identical to his fantastic FRIDAY THE 13TH scores minus the “Kill-kill-kill-ma-ma-ma!” echoes. The star, Kevin Spirtas even shows up a few years later in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 7 A NEW BLOOD.

Though it is a by the numbers slasher film, Craven does bring his trap making game as there are all kinds of pullies, spiked traps, sand pits, and the like made by both the biker kids and the killers themselves as they wage war on one another. Most are overly elaborate, but as with Nancy’s traps for Freddy in the original A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and the matchstick exploding trailer and makeshift tripwire survival traps of THE HILLS HAVE EYES, they are at least interesting to look at. DePalma gets a lot of both awe and flack for his overly complex set pieces, but Craven did his fair share of Rube Goldbergian monstrosities in his earlier films himself that is worth noting.

If anything, this is a nice snippet of what horror was like in 1985. Everyone was trying to invest their own slasher franchise and with Craven branching out from NIGHTMARE, it seems he was placing his chips in an older property. Lacking in the deft themes and a lot of the grittiness of the original, THE HILLS HAVED EYES PART 2 remains entertaining as an oft times laughably bad horror schlocker.

Maybe if only they called it THE HILLS STILL HAVE EYES, it might have been better…

Check out the trailer here!!