Cover your Eyes for this Wes Craven-scripted sequel to a remake of his

One of the more brilliant bits of filmmaking to appear on cinema screens this year is the teaser trailer for The Hills Have Eyes II, which opens on an empty desert landscape at sunset to the bluesy ballad “Insect Eyes” by Devendra Banhart. A boot enters the frame, then a body, dressed in post-apocalyptic gear and dragging a corpse across the rocky ground with a rope. Another figure follows, and, as his rope pulls taut, the camera tilts to reveal that the viewer is the second victim. In less than a minute, image and music marry to create an indelible aesthetic.

If only the film it was designed to promote was as artistically rendered. The scene, which is also featured on the poster, unfortunately never even appears in the movie.

What we get instead are stock characters in a thin plot about a misfit military unit delivering supplies to top-secret Sector 16 in the Yuma Desert of New Mexico. The site of nuclear tests decades ago, the mines in the hills are now occupied by mutants, lumpily deformed so that they blend in seamlessly with the rocky desert, and particularly interested in the women, whom they keep alive for breeding purposes. The National Guardsmen and -women are picked off one by one in scenes of birth, death, rape and other carnage that aim to be as grotesque as possible. Distributor: Fox Atomic
Cast: Jessica Stroup, Reshad Strik, Michael McMillian, Daniella Alonso, Lee Thompson Young, Ben Crowley and Eric Edelstein
Director: Martin Weisz
Screenwriters: Wes Craven and Jonathan Craven
Producers: Wes Craven, Marianne Maddalena and Peter Locke
Genre: Horror
Rating: R for prolonged sequences of strong gruesome horror violence and gore, a rape and language
Running time: 89 min.
Release date: March 23, 2007