The heroes had to fend off "freaks who kill and rape."
The set for the American horror film still remains in Morocco.
The set for the film "The Hills Have Eyes" still stands by a semi-abandoned road in Morocco, about 35 km from Ouarzazate. Filming took place here in 2005, and the film was released in 2006.
It is a story about an American family who, while traveling through southern Nevada, gets stranded in the desert after a flat tire and faces an attack from mutated inhabitants of the hills. Interestingly, the Moroccan landscape turned out to be surprisingly similar in spirit to the landscapes of the southwestern United States.
Critic Matt Zoller Seitz from The New York Times wrote in his review: "Wes Craven's 1977 film 'The Hills Have Eyes,' in which suburban residents fought against cannibal mutants, was a vivid parable about the thin line separating civilization from savagery. The 2006 remake 'The Hills Have Eyes' was essentially the same film with glossier production values and a less satirical, more brutal approach to violence. This sequel, in which National Guard trainees find themselves trapped at a former nuclear test site and are pursued by carnivorous freaks headquartered in a mountain bunker-like hideout, is essentially a catalog of transgressive imagery, lit and edited like a heavy metal music video."
Scott Tobias from The A.V. Club wrote in his review: "The premise for 'The Hills Have Eyes 2,' a quick sequel to the skillful yet gratuitous remake of Craven's original by Alexandre Aja in 2006, seems like a wonderful opportunity to pay homage to the mutants, as it involves a group of soldiers returning to the crime scene. And yet it is foolish to do the opposite, turning the mutants into mine-dwelling freaks who kill and rape, because, well, that's what they do. After a prologue so disgusting it defies description, the film unfolds in 'Sector 15' New Mexico, where a handful of military technicians are busy installing a top-secret surveillance system.
When a group of National Guard trainees arrives on-site to deliver equipment, they are shocked to find that people are either missing or dead, and they begin to scour the surrounding hills on a search-and-rescue mission. What they do not realize is that the mutants are luring them into various traps designed to kill men and abduct women for (ugh) breeding purposes. So these unprepared and often completely inept soldiers must fight their way out of trouble. The director, veteran music video maker Martin Weisz—could the producers please look for talent elsewhere in the future?—'The Hills Have Eyes 2' assembles the most motley crew of incompetents this side of the 'Police Academy' films, but somehow lacks the laughs.
