UK Release Date: 30-07-2007
UK Certificate: 18
Director: Martin Weisz
Country: US
Distributor: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

After Alexandre Aja’s hugely effective, unrelentingly violent remake of Wes Craven’s Seventies exploitation classic, we now get this hastily contrived sequel, which, while not unenjoyable, is so laden with genre clichés, continuity errors and sheer dumbness that it never really convinces.
The wafer-thin story goes like this: some trainee National Guards end up in the old Section 16 nuclear testing grounds trying to figure out what happened to the soldiers stationed there and wind up fighting for their lives against flesh-eating mutant scum who aim to abduct the female guards and use them as breeding stock to replenish their dwindling population.

Even when it sort of works, THHEII is wholly predictable and never achieves much genuine tension. More interesting is the film’s echoing of current American conflicts with a scenario in which young, ill-prepared American soldiers find themselves up against a largely invisible enemy who knows the terrain and picks them off one by one; the film even initially wrong-foots you into thinking that you’re watching US troops in action in Kandahar before this is revealed as an exercise for our trainee heroes taking place in the Nevada desert. As well as this visual evocation of the US’s dirty, distant wars – and the spectre of the Pte Jessica Lynch episode evoked by the film’s female abduction motif – we get too a suggestion that it’s governmental lies and cover-ups that have created this particular enemy. All of which is very Wes Craven – and, indeed, he wrote the script along with his son – but doesn’t save the film from being a pale shadow of its predecessor.