WRITER-director Wes Craven has taken the pulse of the horror genre - and sent it racing - for more than 30 years.

Firstly, with his controversial, low-budget shocker The Last House of the Left and the cult 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes, and then with razor-gloved fiend Freddie Krueger in The Nightmare on Elm Street films before the post-modern hack-and-slash of the Scream trilogy.

Last year, he produced Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes and for the sequel, directed by Martin Weisz, Craven co-writes the screenplay with his son Jonathan.

Concerns about the war in Iraq and the apparent failings of the Bush administration percolate throughout, voiced by a pacifist character who seems an odd fit for relentless slaughter such as this.

Marked for a grisly demise from the opening frame, the pacifist is, instead, transformed into a blood-smeared, gun-toting killing machine.

The unfortunate Carter clan, who strayed into the mutants' lair in the first film, is but a distant rumble in the stomachs of the cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes 2.

Instead, a unit of National Guards and their gruff commanding officer, Sarge (Flex Alexander), head into the desert on a routine assignment to deliver supplies to a team of scientists.

Sarge and his trainees soon come under attack from the cannibals. To make matters worse, the only escape route is down into the mines, home to the mutants, where danger lurks snarling in every dank, shadowy corner.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 doesn't scrimp on the graphic dismemberment and evisceration, imagining some very creative and gruesome deaths for the attractive cast, including one sequence that brings a horrific new meaning to the notion of pulling someone's leg.

Characters' emotional arcs are all too brief, submerged beneath all those entrails, and as usual, they demonstrate stupidity in the face of danger, separating themselves from the group.

  • See it at the Empire and ABC.