You know something's gone amiss when a horror movie's decline begins the moment the baddies make themselves known. Either that, or you might be watching a non-"Scream"/"A Nightmare on Elm Street" Wes Craven film, since he was prone to misfires. A drab, overlong (even at less than 90 minutes) sequel to one of Craven's better movies outside of his slasher tent-pole franchises, "The Hills Have Eyes Part II" has more in common with a lesser "Friday the 13th" movie than the films you'd tend to associate its director with. Set several years after the events of "The Hills Have Eyes", the movie finds a motocross team running afoul of the surviving members of the cannibalistic murderers of the earlier movie and duly being picked off. Among them is Rachel (Janus Blythe), who we learn is related to the monstrous clan, and Beast, a German shepherd who survived the original massacre and (in one of this movie's more novel moments) gets his own flashback sequence. Not much of interest is done with the tenuous connections to the original and not much of interest is done with the killing desert scenario either, except maybe for a scene where one of the disposable characters thwarts a trap set up by the villains only to be immediately splattered by a boulder, Wile E. Coyote style. Anyway, "The Hills Have Eyes Part II" has none of the visceral rawness of the opening film nor the ingenious humour of Craven's better efforts. It just falls flat and wears out its welcome long before the credits finally roll.
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