Years after the massacre of the Carter family by the cannibals in the Air Force gunnery range, Bobby Carter has now married Ruby, the cannibal girl who saved him. She now calls herself Rachel & together the couple run a Yamaha dirt bike dealership. Rachel decides to go along with a team of professional dirt bike riders to a competition, which takes them deep into the territory where Rachel's family used to roam. But what she doesn't know is that one of her brothers, Pluto, has survived & together with an uncle named Reaper are still active in the area. When their bus breaks down in the desert area, the team are picked off one by one by the cannibals. The Hills Have Eyes was Wes Craven's second film & his first real classic – a brutal survivalist tale where two families took on each other for survival in a brutal battle. In the same year as his greatest work, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven decided to mount a sequel to Hills. Not that it left the door open for one – Craven had to retcon some details in order to 'revive' Michael Berryman's character Pluto & create an entirely new character in the Reaper. The only other members to make a return are Robert Houston (who only appears in some early scenes) & Janus Blythe, the cannibal girl now civilised adult.
While the original was a minor classic & an important part of Wes Craven's career (the director would later mount a remake & a further sequel to it), this sequel is a far cry from the brutal intensity of the original. This time out, Craven treats the setup in a more slasher-like fashion (slasher films were the rage then), without any of the intelligence that he demonstrated in the original. The film moves with the pace of your average Friday the 13th sequel & even with a similar score, courtesy of that franchise's musical hack Harry Manfredini. The killings are no longer brutally visceral but standard slasher stalk-&-slash. The addition of a blind girl as one of the good guys is interesting, her trip past the bodies of her friends having a slight suspense value to it, but the rest of the cast are given one-dimensional roles. As for Janus Blythe, she doesn't get to face off with her family, instead taken out before the climax (although it is not made clear whether she was killed or simply knocked out).
While the original was a minor classic & an important part of Wes Craven's career (the director would later mount a remake & a further sequel to it), this sequel is a far cry from the brutal intensity of the original. This time out, Craven treats the setup in a more slasher-like fashion (slasher films were the rage then), without any of the intelligence that he demonstrated in the original. The film moves with the pace of your average Friday the 13th sequel & even with a similar score, courtesy of that franchise's musical hack Harry Manfredini. The killings are no longer brutally visceral but standard slasher stalk-&-slash. The addition of a blind girl as one of the good guys is interesting, her trip past the bodies of her friends having a slight suspense value to it, but the rest of the cast are given one-dimensional roles. As for Janus Blythe, she doesn't get to face off with her family, instead taken out before the climax (although it is not made clear whether she was killed or simply knocked out).