The Hills Have Eyes II

THERE is, perhaps, a special circle of hell devoted to the screening of sequels to horror remakes. In such a film the essence of the original material is usually so diluted that it could be sold to the gullible as a kind of cinematic homeopathy. Over here, you new age buffoons. Become desensitised to the effects of violence without undergoing any of the discomforting shocks and alarms.

The Hills Have Eyes II is, however, co-written by Wes Craven, originator of the classic 1977 mutants-eat-babies flick, so we might expect some of that film's rotten miasma to still hang about the place. Sadly, Craven, like so many others in Hollywood, has decided to say something about Iraq and has, accordingly, delivered a film that has too much to do with military incursions and not enough to do with cannibalistic inbreds.

The new picture begins promisingly with a civilised woman giving noisy birth to a mutant baby and being murdered for her trouble. We then go among a platoon of National Guardsmen as they are sent into the hills where the attacks took place in the (perfectly decent) 2006 picture. The team, a bunch of hobbyists and adventurers, are hampered by their lack of training and the fact that they are armed, for the most part, with blanks.

Sound familiar? The film treads on territory mapped out by Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981) - itself a belated allegory for the Vietnam conflict - but has little of that film's accumulating menace or sense of place. Indeed, after the first brutal killing, Hills II rapidly degenerates into a repetitive, muddy turkey shoot. What it is trying to say about events in the Middle East is anyone's guess.