The Hills Have Eyes 2 Fan-Edit

Just because a film is
re-edited by
fans, that doesn’t make it worth
watching (even if you’re tied to a bed). Today I’d planned to
review the fanedit of The Hills Have
Eyes 2: Scary as Hell edition, and was even going to see if I could embed it here for your enjoyment. At least, that’s what I’d planned to do before I’d watched the film. But this isn’t the kind of film one would chose to watch again, it’s the kind of film you throw into the dvd around three in the morning to clear the stragglers out of the front room so you can get some sleep after a hard night of drinking.

Sadly, despite the valiant effort
put forth by fan-editor 3Raz0r, this film remains unwatchable. I say sadly because I greatly enjoyed
the 2006 remake directed by
Alexandre
Aja of Wes Craven’s 1977 horror film,
and I’d hoped that a fanedit of the sequel
would somehow salvage it.

The Hills Have Eyes (2006) was violent,
but with a purpose. It followed a family
wandering lost through an abandoned
nuclear test test where years earlier
miners living in hills and caves had
degenerated, becoming cannibalistic
mutants scattered amidst the ruins
of a simulation of a town deep in
New Mexico built for above-ground
nuclear tests.

While the only actual nuclear test to
occur in the US was the detonation
at Trinity in New Mexico, the film
toys with the idea that we are already
living in a post-apocalyptic landscape
that just isn’t evenly distributed.

The Hills Have Eyes was terrifying
precisely because it worked on many
different levels – the immediate
gut-wrenching gore one would expect
in a film filled with cannibalistic
mutants armed with antique mining
gear, as well as the more sublime
horror of the degenerative processes
of radiation.

In stark contrast, The Hills Have Eyes
2, even with the more expository scenes
cut from the film by a fan who obviously
took the time to analyze what could
increase the intensity, still fails
to move beyond an excuse to show
off what the special effects crew
had cooked up. There was no moment
of breath-taking pans across craters
filled with the vehicles of decades
of victims, as was in the film Aja
directed. Instead there’s a portapotty
and a few windblown tents at the base
of a mountain.

What the first film promised and delivered
is scarcely touched on in this sequel.

If this sequel had been a better film,
I would have uploaded it, embedded it
here, and advised you to watch it. At
the very least, I’d expected that a film
featuring US military pursuing a violent
band of evildoers through a hilly desert
dotted with caves could have at least
put on a pretense of being a reflection
of the times.

Instead, it serves as proof that,
despite the best efforts of the fans,
sometimes a bad film re-edited
is still a steaming pile of shit.

But don’t take my word for it, feel
free to compare for yourself from the torrents.

Torrents:

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)


The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)


The Hills Have Eyes 2: Scary As Hell Edition (fanedit)