The Hills Have Eyes 2 makes an attempt to pick up where the original film left off. In the prequel a family is taunted, mutilated, and half are killed after traveling through the New Mexico valleys in Sector 16. Now, scientists and the U.S. Army are back on a search and destroy mission in the hopes of annihilating the mutilated miners.
Finding their base abandoned, a group of U.S. National Guard trainees must head into the hills in search of the officers. The group starts out with nine, who are eventually killed off, one by one. Along the way, they find some of the scientists and Army officers they were looking for, some dead and others still alive. They learn ways to trick the mutants, but are always outdone.
Being in an abandoned nuclear test site full of hidden sinkholes, the mutant miners find ways to steal the trainees’ climbing gear, and taunt them by throwing rocks and making animal noises. In the end, four officers remain, and head into the miners’ mountain caves, in search of a female officer who was taken. Fans of the first film will have to see the second installment in order to find out who survives.
The tagline of the original is “the lucky ones die first,” while the sequel’s is “the lucky ones die fast.” The sequel is not as gruesome and definitely not as good. In the original, the miners lived in a fake city created by the government, but this movie doesn’t even make note of that city, and now the mutated people live in mountain caves. Their deformities also seem to vary from what the original people looked like. They have lizard like-tongues and skin diseases that make them look like aliens. What also changed were the methods by which characters die. Most of the trainees die by accident, like shooting each other or wandering off by themselves. Some deaths are caused by the miners, but the viewer never gets to see it. All that they see are the results. Overall, the film doesn’t stand up to the original’s horror. For those horror fanatics, though, who want to see it for themselves, it is playing in theatres now.