No one goes to a movie like The Hills Have Eyes 2 and expects the second coming of Citizen Kane. The same is true for the majority of low-rent horror flicks, especially those Roger Ebert has dubbed "Dead Teenager Movies." The Hills Have Eyes 2 definitely qualifies as a Dead Teenager Movie, only here, the teenagers have been given the superficial appearance of military trainees.<br /><br />Some will argue the line "it's only a movie" when questionable facts are raised in a movie review, but I've always been a firm believer that all good fantasy must be rooted in reality in order to be effective. In the Hills Have Eyes 2, we're to believe the main characters are military people on a training exercise, but they look and talk like high school kids camping in the desert. The dialog is awful and frequently vulgar to excess. Though the films aren't nearly comparable, I kept imagining these "soldiers" being in Platoon, and shuddering with dread.<br /><br />Very little about the characters evokes a soldier other than rifles and fatigues: radio transmissions are carried out like teenage phone conversations; a Colonel is addresses as "hey, asshole" by a Private. And nobody seems to have the slightest idea what to do, or any sense of command structure, when things begin to go wrong. I think of the soldiers in James Cameron's Aliens, a film of pure fantasy, and how even those futuristic Marines behaved like real soldiers despite their fantastic situations. Fantasy rooted in reality.<br /><br />I try to begin watching a movie as a 5 on a scale of 10, and judge it's strengths and weaknesses from there. You have to allow concessions for the material; there's no way Star Wars is as good of a movie as The Godfather, on equal terms. But both are excellent examples of their type.<br /><br />In that respect, while the Hills Have Eyes 2 is a pretty dreadful exercise in amateur and immature writing, it's only modestly worse in that regard than the typical Dead Teenager Movie. On a technical side, the movie appears to have decent production values and is pretty well made from that perspective. Scenes that are intended to shock, or which are intended to evoke urgency or suspense generally work. So, while watching The Hills Have Eyes 2 may indeed be a fate worse than death, there are certainly far worse horror flicks in circulation.<br /><br />It's worth a watch for those who enjoy this type of stuff without the usual fanboy baggage, or those who don't tend towards thinking every movie they see is either the Best Ever or the Worst Ever of all time. If you don't "get" horror, especially the Dead Teenager variety, you're not likely to have a good time with this one.<br /><br />4/10