Metacritic Film

Hills Have Eyes II, The

Starring Michael McMillian, Jessica Stroup, Daniella Alonso, Jacob Vargas, Lee Thompson Young, Ben Crowley, Eric Edelstein, and Flex Alexander

MPAA RATING: R for prolonged sequences of strong gruesome horror violence and gore, a rape and language

Fox Atomic / 20th Century Fox
Horror
89 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters March 23, 2007

As part of a routine mission, a unit of National Guard soldiers stops at a New Mexico outpost in order to deliver equipment to a group of atomic scientists. When they arrive at the isolated research camp, however, they find it is mysteriously deserted. After spotting a distress signal in a distant mountain range, the team decides to embark on a search and rescue mission into the hills in order to locate the missing scientists. Little do they know that these are the very hills that the ill-fated Carter family once visited, and that a tribe of cannibalistic mutants lies in wait. (20th Century Fox)

WRITTEN BY
Jonathan Craven
Wes Craven

DIRECTED BY
Martin Weisz

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

32 / 100

Critic Reviews

63 Boston Globe
The director, Martin Weisz , doesn't lean on a lot of noise and editing tricks. He can relax, since all the scares are built into the Cravens' script, which invokes both "Goonies" and last year's instant-classic, chicks-versus-cave-dwelling-vampires flick "The Descent."
60 Empire
Pretty solid gory horror.
58 Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
A retro horror-comedy featuring quick deaths and cheapo-looking gore, with a few dorky laughs and gross-outs but not so many scares.
50 Village Voice Jim Ridley
For anyone other than hardcore gore-hounds, this flipbook of deliberately invoked global-unrest horrors, from friendly-fire killings to rape as a breeding weapon, is effectively mean and unrelenting--and pretty far from fun.
50 TV Guide
Though written by Wes Craven and his son, Jonathan Craven, this is pretty standard stuff: A lot of creeping through dark tunnels with just enough characterization to help you keep track of who's still alive, but not enough gore to really satisfy fans of Aja's bloodbath.
50 Variety John Anderson
The politics of "Hills 2" won't enlist any new converts to the horror ranks, but existing fans will be drawn to the combination of visceral tension, violent payoff and the patented Craven gift for innovative gore.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
It's not fun to watch.
40 The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz
The film is brazenly indebted to old cowboys-and-Indians movies and to James Cameron’s "Aliens." Gleefully sensationalistic and paced like an adults-only shoot-'em-up video game, it's ultimately less interested in subversion and subtext than in making viewers squirm, shriek and throw up into their popcorn bags.
40 The Hollywood Reporter
The Hills Have Eyes 2 proves that even grisly, gory violence can be awfully boring.
38 New York Post
The mutants are brain-damaged; the filmmakers don't have that excuse to justify this movie, which is the kind of thing the sergeant would call "a stunning display of individual and group stupidity."
38 The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason Anderson
A perfunctory gore fest and quite possibly the year's worst date movie.
38 Premiere
As a fan of the genre, and someone who genuinely loves such recent horror efforts as "The Descent" and "The Host," I respectfully suggest that the atmosphere for horror movies might be better if moviemakers stopped making ones like this.
30 Los Angeles Times
You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.
25 ReelViews
After this disgrace, it's time to shut the hills' eyes for good.
25 New York Daily News
On the whole, this is an awfully long slog through very arid terrain, in which generic soldiers track, fight and try to escape from generic villains (you'd be surprised at how uninteresting mutant flesh-eaters can be). I can't speak for the hills, but I spent most of the movie just trying to keep my eyes open.
25 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Assembles the most motley group of incompetents this side of a "Police Academy" movie, yet somehow misses the laughs. But humorlessness is probably the least of the film's problems, lagging behind amateur-night performances from the no-name cast, a homogenous visual palette (and from a music-video director, no less!), and lots of pointless sadism.
20 Austin Chronicle
As witless and simpleminded as the irradiated humanoids that serve as the franchise’s bad guys.
10 Film Threat Felix Vasquez, Jr.
This horror fanatic doesn't have room for Craven in his genre anymore. Collect your cash and call it a day already, Wes.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW

©2009 CNET Networks Inc. All rights reserved.