The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1985)

Directed by Wes Craven. Starring Kevin Spirtas, Tamara Stafford, Colleen Riley, Janus Blythe, John Bloom, John Laughlin, Michael Berryman, Willard E. Pugh, Penny Johnson, Peter Frechette, Robert Houston. [R]

Coming off A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sultan of Shock Wes Craven almost had to relinquish authority of his sultanate with this forced, pitiful sequel (although, to be fair, the movie was shot back in 1983 before Elm Street went into production). Padded out by flashbacks to events from the first film, the incomplete movie suffers from plenty of logic lapses and come-and-go characters. The preposterous setup has Bobby, a Carter family survivor from the first film, and Rachel, one of the members of the wild Jupe clan who slaughtered some of his kin (then known as Ruby), together(!) developing a super fuel for a motorcycle team, and on the way to a race, the busload of bikers takes a wrong turn in the desert and…do I need to explain more? In the first Hills, we actually got to know and care about the family (well, maybe not so much the patriarch after he started casually throwing around the N-word); this cardboard bunch, even recurring characters like Bobby (who declines to go to the race, meaning he disappears in the first act), have all the depth of the roster of maniacs and soon-to-be-victims from your average early-80s slasher. Several sequences are even shot and scored like one of those mad-killer cheapies, including one extended bit toward the end that cycles through numerous “Final Girl”-showdown clichés, and it’s depressing whenever Craven devolves into anonymous hack-work like that. The laughable ending, which suggests it’s a worse idea to try to jump over a wall of flames than be dragged face-first right into one, closes things out with an exasperated snort and a shrug. Wes disowned the thing, for good reason; there’s no reason, good or bad, to subject yourself to it.

23/100