The Hills Have Eyes Part II [1985]

In 1983, Wes Craven was in something of a career lull. He had made his reputation in the 1970s, with The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, but - like other directors who had come to prominence in the horror genre in the Nixon-Ford-Carter years - was finding it hard to carry on in the Reagan era. Stranger in Our House [aka Summer of Fear], a TV movie based on a novel by the author of I Know What You Did Last Summer, was twenty years ahead of its time in latching onto teen witch horror but still seemed a deeply average Linda Blair vehicle. After a fruitless spell in the jungles of Central America researching a project called Marimba eventually filmed by Italian schlockmeister Ruggero Deodato as Cut and Run [with Craven regular Michael Berryman], Craven's theatrical comebacks were Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing. Deadly Blessing, an underrated supernatural thriller, suffered in the United Kingdom when distributors lopped off a demonic ending to fit the film into the then-popular psycho slasher sub-genre, while the comic book adaptation Swamp Thing revived the character for DC [thus boosting the career of writer Alan Moore] and yielded a sequel, a TV series and other spin-offs without anyone except rabid Adrienne Barbeau fans really warming to it. Craven kept shopping around his dog-eared script for A Nightmare on Elm Street to unimpressed studios and working on an adaptation of V.C. Andrews' novel Flowers in the Attic as his bank account dwindled.

Peter Locke and Barry Cahn, producers of The Hills Have Eyes, had told Craven they 'could always get the money to do a sequel if you want to do it.' The bulk of the budget for the sequel came, surprisingly, from Great Britain, at that time hardly a friend to Craven's brand of explicit horror, from New Realm, who had released the 1977 Hills theatrically after its successful premiere at the London Film Festival, and Video Tape Centre, who had made a fortune from the title in the Gold Rush early days of rental video [when it was miraculously not included on the Department of Public Prosecution's 'video nasties' list]. At the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, New Realm's Adrienne Fancey and VTC's Guy Collins showed a promo reel containing highlights of The Hills Have Eyes to raise further investment, from people doubtless later surprised to find much of that promo actually cut into the finished sequel. A side-effect of the UK financing of the sequel is the existence of a collector's item Hills 2 paperback novelisation by British science fiction author David Garnett, writing under the name 'David Ferring', emblazoned with the slogan 'the lucky ones were already dead' … and the legend 'the terrifying sequel now a major film'. Pre-sales were so strong that the film went into production without even a US distribution deal in place. 'We've been paid and the picture's been paid for,' said Craven, 'so there's no urgency in selling it, but we do expect to have a release soon.'

Craven worked on a script, originally called The Night of Jupiter, trying hard to get round the fact that he'd killed off his main villains in the first film. 'It was a much better script, I think, than the movie turned out to be,' he said, later. 'It was an important film for me to do, just to get the momentum going again, but it was very underfunded. The movie was originally budgeted on the first draft of the script, and the producers said they thought it should be expanded, so I wrote a much better and bigger script, but the budget stayed the same. It was a real nightmare to shoot.' At the time, he was more enthusiastic, telling Fangoria, 'I want to shoot in the Mojave Desert, where the first one was filmed. We've contacted several principles to repeat their roles, including Janus Blythe and Michael Berryman. All of this suddenly happened while I was away on vacation, and now financing has come through for Nightmare on Elm Street as well.'

Though obviously more excited that his literal long-term dream project was finally to be made and also in pre-production on a TV movie called The Club that became Invitation to Hell, Craven still worked up some enthusiasm for his sequel chore. 'Bobby and Ruby are married, and run a Yamaha motorcycle dealership,' he explained, revealing what happened to the surviving head of the victim family and the turncoat daughter of the cannibal clan from Hills. 'Some friends of Bobby's and his wife are off to enter a motorcycle competition, but they're running late for registration so they decide to take a short-cut through the desert - over the protests of Ruby and another girl, Cass, who is blind. They take the short-cut and run into the remnants of Jupiter's gang. We've all remained friends since the first one was made, and they've hounded us about doing the sequel for years, so we figured, let's have some fun and do it. We wrote a script, it turned out real hot, so we're going to go out and have a rip in the desert. I know there's a certain amount of snobbery about a director doing a sequel to his own film. But screw that!'

The most visible returning cast members from The Hills Have Eyes were Janus Blythe, whose wild child Ruby is at least superficially socialised in this instalment, and the unforgettable Michael Berryman, whose face had figured prominently in most advertising materials for the original. Big, bald, goonish-looking Berryman, who had early appearances in Doc Savage - the Man of Bronze and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, remains a horror and fantasy regular [usually as mutants or aliens], with large and small roles in Craven's Deadly Blessing and Invitation to Hell, and credits on Weird Science, My Science Project, Highway to Heaven, ALF, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Barbarians, Solar Crisis, The Guyver, Double Dragon, Tales From the Crypt, Spy Hard and The X-Files. Blythe, less prolific, appeared in Tobe Hooper's Death Trap [aka Eaten Alive] before The Hills Have Eyes and also had roles in The Incredible Melting Man, Black Oak Conspiracy and the John Carpenter-scripted TV movie Zuma Beach. Other hold-overs, in original footage and extensive extracts from the first film, are whitebread heroes Robert Houston [1941, Strange Behavior, Growing Pains] and Susan Lanier [The Night the Bridge Fell Down, episodes of Welcome Back Kotter and Eight is Enough], cannibals Lance Gordon [Live and Let Die, Any Which Way You Can, Fatal Vision, Attack of the 5'2" Woman] and patriarch James Whitworth [Terminal Island, Planet of the Dinosaurs, The Candy Snatchers] and Beast the Dog.

The most notable franchise newcomer is hulking John Bloom, cast as a new cannibal called 'the Reaper'. A veteran monster performer in vintage schlock [and not to be confused with John Bloom, alter ego of 'drive-in critic' Joe Bob Briggs], Bloom is remembered as the puffy-faced Frankenstein Monster in Al Adamson's Dracula vs Frankenstein and the lumbering, slower half of The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant but also took man-in-a-monster-suit roles in Brain of Blood, The Dark, Harry and the Hendersons [aka Bigfoot and the Hendersons] and Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country. Bloom influenced a major horror icon, if only as an example of a route not to take: when looking around for an actor to play Freddy Krueger in the first Nightmare, Craven remembered that 'John Bloom was a huge guy, but he couldn't ride a motorcycle and he couldn't act that well, so this time I decided to go with a normal-sized actor [Robert Englund], and make him frightening through make-up and call upon his acting abilities.' In fact, Bloom's imposing size proved a problem. 'We ended up with this 7'2" villain on a motorcycle, and he made it look like a tricycle. It was the most ridiculous sight in the world when he actually got on this thing and his feet were hanging off.'

Other fresh faces: Tamara Stafford, introduced here as as the doom-saying blind psychic Cass, though her subsequent career highlight was a bit in Against All Odds; Kevin Blair, who appeared in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood before changing his name to Kevin Spirtas and showing up in a couple of Subspecies sequels, long runs on US soap staples Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless and a bit in Apt Pupil; the very busy Willard Pugh, a specialist in black-guy-who-gets-killed roles [here, it's an axe in the head], of The Color Purple, Toy Soldiers, Robocop 2, Amazon Women on the Moon, A Rage in Harlem, The Guyver, Puppet Master 5 and Progeny; Collen Riley, who had been in Deadly Blessing but then disappeared; Peter Frechette, of Grease 2, The Kindred, The Unholy and Paint It Black; drawn-looking John Laughlin, who has mostly unsympathetic supporting roles in An Officer and a Gentleman, Footloose, The Lawnmower Man and The Rock and a rare lead as Kathleen Turner's private eye lover ['the human penis'] in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion; and Penny Johnson, the cast member whose career seems to have survived Hills 2 in the best shape, with continuing roles on high-profile TV series: Larry's assistant Beverly in The Larry Sanders Show, Sisko's wife Kasidy on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Nurse Practitioner Lynette Evans on ER and [as Penny Johnson Jerard] the scheming wife of the presidential candidate in 24.

While other Craven films have spun off franchises - the Elm Street and Scream series, even Swamp Thing - Hills 2 seems to have choked the possibilities of further tussles with Jupiter's clan. Mind Ripper, originally called The Outpost, was developed half-heartedly as The Hills Have Eyes, Part 3 [and would have been set in outer space] but took a different turn and became a mutant-in-an-abandoned-underground-base picture. The 1995 direct-to-video quickie was directed by Jonathan Craven, Wes's son [who had his balloon popped in The Last House on the Left] and bears a 'Wes Craven Presents' legend. Since Hills 2, Craven's fortunes have continued to see-saw: for television, he has worked on Chiller, episodes of The Twilight Zone, Casebusters, The People Next Door, Night Visions, Nightmare Café and Laurel Canyon; his films as a director range from Deadly Friend, Shocker and Vampire in Brooklyn to The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs and [after varying involvement in five Elm Street sequels] Wes Craven's New Nightmare. His 'Wes Craven Presents' credit was unhappily dusted off for Wishmaster, the Carnival of Souls remake and Dracula 2000 and plays jokey little roles in Body Bags, The Fear, Shadow Zone: The Undead Express and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Craven directed the three Scream films for Miramax and the Meryl Streep true-life story Music of the Heart.

Interview with Wes Craven, 1985.

Kim Newman: Before A Nightmare on Elm Street, your last three films have only been seen on video in the United Kingdom.

Wes Craven: They were limited successes, if at all.

KN: The Hills Have Eyes Part II is probably your weakest film.

WC: In my defence, it was not intended to be released as it was. It was not completed, and I had an agreement that when we'd finished the initial shoot the producers would cut it together and we'd see what we needed. Then we'd go shoot for another five or six days. That was agreed upon but they decided to make an answer print. Suddenly they were acting as if that was the finished film.

KN: Does that explain the heavy reliance on flashbacks to the first film?

WC: The whole thing is unfinished. I wasn't satisfied with the whole ending. There were a couple of main sequences in the centre of the film that didn't quite work. And the whole opening needed to be shortened drastically. The first time you see Jupiter, and the Reaper comes out on the motorcycle, it just doesn't work. It needed to be reshot. It needed to have two days devoted to it rather than two hours at the end of a day. The whole shoot was so rushed. It was a twenty-four day shoot, and the film had numerous complicated stunts. It was impossible to shoot that film in that amount of time. Look at the explosion at the end. The guy made us clear practically the whole valley. He was telling us it would blow up everything, and it ended up going phhffft. We needed to buy another bus and blow it up, but we just didn't have the time and money to do that.

KN: Has it put you off being connected with the sequels to Nightmare and Last House that have been announced?

WC: Oh yes. The reason I did Hills 2 is because I was dead broke and needed to do any film. I would have directed Godzilla Goes to Paris. It got me going again, and got me some money in the bank, and it got my confidence back a little bit. It hasn't even been released, so it's not done me any harm. It does have the first flashback from the point of view of a dog, so that's something!
KIM NEWMAN

Prepared for an aborted DVD release; first published here.

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