Just before A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET revitalized the horror genre and Wes Craven's career, the down-on-his-luck director coughed up a sequel to his previous hit with THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.

Although he has built up a business in motorbike racing and developed a new top secret formula, Bobby (Robert Houston, CHEERLEADERS WILD WEEKEND) has not gotten over the trauma of losing most of his family to a band of cannibals deep in the desert eight years before. The fears that Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth, SWEET SUGAR) and his cannibal clan are not really dead are so debilitating that he cannot bring himself to go out to the desert to a big racing competition where he planned to give out samples of his formula and sell it to an oil company; whereupon his girlfriend Rachel (Janus Blythe, SPINE) agrees to go along with his racing troupe: Roy (Kevin Spirtas, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD) and his blind girlfriend Cass (Tamara Stafford), hunky Hulk (John Laughlin, CRIMES OF PASSION) and his girlfriend Jane (Colleen Riley, DEADLY BLESSING), wise-cracking Foster (Willard E. Pugh, THE COLOR PURPLE) and his girlfriend Sue (THE ORVILLE's Penny Johnson Jerald), practical joker Harry (Peter Frechette, GREASE 2), and Beast the family dog who also survived the massacre. In the plot contrivance to end all plot contrivances, it turns out that the entire crew has forgotten about the end of Daylight Savings Time and are an hour behind schedule. The only solution is to take a shortcut through the desert that will take them near the site of the previous massacre. Despite Rachel's objections, the others vote to take the shortcut and they of course run out of gas next to an ominous-looking silver mine that seems to be not as deserted as it appears from the outside. While the group split off to explore the area, Rachel is attacked by Pluto (Michael Berryman, CUT AND RUN) who survived getting his throat ripped out by Beast and recognizes her as his sister Ruby who turned against the family and helped Bobby, his sister Brenda, brother-in-law Doug, and infant nephew ultimately prevail over the cannibals. She is able to fight him off, but he warns her that Papa Jupiter's big brother The Reaper (John Bloom, THE DARK) is lurking about and has plans for Ruby and her friends involving his secret underground mine shaft.

Although Craven had said everything there was to be said about the Sawny Bean-inspired desert cannibal clan in THE HILLS HAVE EYES, he was certainly in no position to turn down a job after the box office failure of SWAMP THING which was released the same week that distributor Avco Embassy was sold to Norman Lear whose took a dim view of the company's genre product, as well as the little impact made by his DEADLY BLESSING the same year. In between the memorable TV movie INVITATION TO HELL and going into production on A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, he mounted THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (partially funded by the British distributor of THE HILLS HAVE EYES and partially by his HILLS producer Peter Locke) and seems to have thrown his imagination completely out the window and worked off a checklist of every slasher cliché from people wandering off alone in the dark to a Henry Manfredini score that sounds as much like outtakes from his FRIDAY THE 13TH scores as his incidental cues for SLAUGHTER HIGH two years later, while the production shutting down when it ran out of funds was prepared for with a handful of flashbacks to the first film afforded to Bobby, Ruby, and even the dog Beast. Performances are generally competent, although the blind final girl winds up being the most annoying character of all with her "Cassandra-like" premonitions of danger and general chipper attitude. Bloom's The Reaper has nothing on Whitworth's Papa Jupiter, coming across as a hulking idiot in MAD MAX-esque biker wear with his vocal performance overdubbed by Nicholas Worth (DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE) to little effect; as Roy shouts during the climax: "The Reaper sucks!" HILLS producer Peter Locke's later desert-bound sci-fi project MINDRIPPER was titled THE HILLS HAVE EYES 3 in some territories.

Given scant theatrical release by Castle Hill Productions, THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (onscreen title: THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II) did most of its business on video courtesy of Thorn/EMI. Befitting is tatty reputation, Image Entertainment's 2002 fullscreen DVD was nothing to write home about while its subsequent 2012 Kino Lorber Blu-ray – licensed from the British company Euro London who got it from the British financier – was less impressive on its own terms than the question of why the awful sequel got an unmolested high definition transfer while the Blu-ray representation of the original film was Image's upscale (this being four years before Arrow's remastered edition). Mastered in 2K from presumably the same elements as the Kino Lorber Blu-ray, Arrow's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC widescreen transfer is framed at 1.85:1 rather than the earlier disc's odd opened-up 1.57:1 aspect ratio. The transfer probably looks as good as the limitations of the production, and the non-negative elements, allow with possibly boosted colors evident less so in the reds of the bus or the few instances of bloodshed than the red gels of the underground scenes late in the film. Whereas the entire film looked like 16mm on the Image DVD, the differences are much clearer between the recycled 35mm blow-up footage from the earlier film and the 35mm original footage which sometimes looks just as rough and under-lit with finer grain (the cinematography of David Lewis compares poorly to the slickness he would bring later eighties genre efforts like NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and NIGHT ANGEL). The LPCM 1.0 mono soundtrack boasts clean dialogue, music, and effects, but somehow the recycled dialogue loops from the original film are more piercing than any of the screams or cries in the rest of the feature. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.