Does The Hills Have Eyes II con­tain that Wes Craven slash­er magic?

When a person’s life is com­plete, it becomes all too easy to look back only to its high points, and to ignore every­thing else as mere bumps along a road to heady suc­cess. Wes Craven, for exam­ple, who died in 2015, is regard­ed as, and reduced to, an ​‘icon of hor­ror’, join­ing the pan­theon of inno­v­a­tive genre film­mak­ers which includes George A Romero, Tobe Hoop­er and (the still very much alive) Dario Argen­to and John Carpenter.

Any hagiog­ra­phy of Craven will high­light his shock­ing (if tonal­ly messy) rape-revenge debut The Last House On The Left, from 1972, his con­tin­u­a­tion of its civil­i­sa­tion-decon­struct­ing themes in 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, his rein­ven­tion of the slash­er in 1984’s A Night­mare On Elm Street and the self-reflex­ive post­mod­ernism of his Wes Craven’s New Night­mare from 1992, and Scream from 1996.

It might even find room for the way he took zom­bie-ism back to its voodoo roots in 1988’s The Ser­pent and the Rain­bow, or for his crazy cri­tique of socioe­co­nom­ic and race issues in 1991’s The Peo­ple Under The Stairs. It almost cer­tain­ly will not, how­ev­er, include The Hills Have Eyes Part II which is, by any stan­dards, a poor­ly writ­ten, low-qual­i­ty sequel which, if nec­es­sary at all, was made about five years too late to have enjoyed any cul­tur­al currency.

This sequel was made for next to noth­ing as a quick­ie cash-in on Craven’s rel­a­tive suc­cess in the past, and at a time when the recep­tion of his most recent fea­tures, Dead­ly Bless­ing (1981) and Swamp Thing (1972), had been poor to mid­dling. His very future as a film­mak­er seemed uncer­tain. The orig­i­nal The Hills Have Eyes came out a year before John Carpenter’s Hal­loween (1978) and would col­late and con­ven­tion­alise stalk-and-slash tropes that had been cribbed from the gial­lo and Bob Clark’s Black Christ­mas (1974). The Hills Have Eyes Part II, how­ev­er, would come out after those self-same tropes had long since been done to death by end­less slash­ers (with dimin­ish­ing returns), and before Craven had start­ed rein­vig­o­rat­ing them on Elm Street.

While the sequel’s set­ting — rocky desert out­crops and an aban­doned mine — might seems quite a dis­tance from the slasher’s more typ­i­cal urban, sub­ur­ban, small­town or lake­side locales (apart from George Mihalka’s 1981 My Bloody Valen­tine, also set in a mine), all the cat-and-mouse busi­ness is much the same. The film also weari­ly retreads scenes from the orig­i­nal, first with actu­al flash­backs — includ­ing one, absurd­ly, from the point of view of the dog Beast — and then with recre­ations of sig­nif­i­cant moments (canine attacks, vehic­u­lar death­traps) from the first film that have already been seen in those very flash­backs. In oth­er words, the whole film feels like a series of blud­geon­ing throw­backs to a his­to­ry (the orig­i­nal film, the slash­er genre) that is already long past its use-by date.

There is some nov­el­ty here. In its open­ing scene, Bob­by Carter (Robert Hous­ton) is shown dis­cussing — with a psy­chi­a­trist — his con­tin­u­ing fear of the desert where, eight years ear­li­er, he saw his fam­i­ly slain by a can­ni­bal clan. Slash­ers are often dri­ven by a pri­mal scene in a killer’s past, but it is unusu­al to see this sort of focus on the last­ing trau­ma suf­fered by a hero. In fact Bobby’s last­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal scars quick­ly put him out of the pic­ture, as he refus­es to accom­pa­ny his bik­er team on a cross-coun­try trip to show off a new super fuel that he has invented.

So the younger male bik­ers and their respec­tive girl­friends – includ­ing Roy (Kevin Spir­tas) and blind Cass (Tama­ra Stafford) – head off with­out Bob­by. For this new gen­er­a­tion of thrill-seek­ing, dis­co-lov­ing city slick­ers is about to encounter their nation’s wilder fron­tier, and the sto­ry of what hap­pened to the Carters out in the desert has become a sort of urban myth or camp­fire tale.

Trav­el­ling along with them is anoth­er sur­vivor of the orig­i­nal, Ruby (Janus Blythe), her name now changed to Rachel as she has become ful­ly civilised after her ear­li­er stay with the can­ni­bals, as well as bark-hap­py Beast the won­der dog, who will once again prove Lassie-like in his abil­i­ties to save the day. Mean­while, on the anthro­pophagous side of the rocky divide, Ruby’s broth­er Plu­to (Michael Berry­man) is also still alive, joined by his hulk­ing uncle The Reaper (John Bloom).

Shot in Joshua Tree for peanuts, this inde­pen­dent, non-union pro­duc­tion nev­er real­ly takes off. Sure, you can see Craven begin­ning to sub­vert the con­ven­tions of the mori­bund slash­er: Cass may be an obvi­ous can­di­date for final girl, but her open­ing scene makes it clear that she is no vir­gin; and unlike the slash­er genre’s typ­i­cal­ly silent masked mon­sters (mod­elled on the likes of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees), Plu­to and the Reaper like to talk their men­ac­ing gib­ber­ish out loud. The prob­lem is that, unlike the gar­ru­lous Fred­dy Krueger in Craven’s sub­se­quent A Night­mare on Elm Street (and its many sequels), these two killers have noth­ing inter­est­ing or wit­ty to say, and might bet­ter have stayed qui­et – or remained for­ev­er hid­den in the desert.

On the mak­ing-of extra that appears on this Arrow release, you can see the inter­viewed cast and crew strain­ing to find any­thing good to say about The Hills Have Eyes Part II (although their respect and affec­tion for Craven still shine through). It is a film des­tined to be a foot­note in Craven’s career – but foot­notes can often pro­vide real, demythol­o­gis­ing insight into both film­mak­ers and the fick­le indus­try that they serve.

The Hills Have Eyes Part II is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films in a brand new 2K restora­tion from orig­i­nal film ele­ments, on 16^th September