The Hills Have Eyes 2

"The most empty-headed, nasty, vacuous piece of horror cinema I have seen in quite a long time" - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

One of a great many cookie-cutter 1970s horror remakes / expansions released in the mid-2000s (see also The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, for example). A little stereotypically, perhaps, Mark described its target audience as consisting entirely of "spotty adolescent teenage geeky boys."

Mark quoted himself saying "Wes Craven is the sociology teacher of horror movies" in order to say he was probably wrong, what with Craven (and his son Jonathan) having writing credits on the film.

The subtext of the mutants having family values while the townsfolk are monstrous was stripped out, and replaced with graphic, nasty and deeply unpleasant rape and death scenes. Craven - who made Last House On The Left - once walked out of Reservoir Dogs at the Sitges Film Festival. When Mark asked why and said "in all my films the violence means something and I hated the fact that in Reservoir Dogs the violence didn't mean anything - it was just there, it was there to be enjoyed, it was there to be leered over - it was like the filmmakers were getting off on it." "I'm sorry," Mark asked rheorically, "what happened to those good intentions?"

During the course of the review, it emerged that Simon saw the original The Hills Have Eyes, which raised him considerably in Mark's own, er, eyes.