2007 ushers in the next chapter in The Hills Have Eyes franchise, helmed this time around by director Martin Weisz, known for directing scores of music videos from artists such as Puff Daddy, Korn, Nickleback and having completed two movies previous to this. He takes on the task of making his third film and one to live up to the work that previous director Alexandre Aja made in breathing life back into a franchise that is more than 20 years old.

The opening scene gives you a glimpse of what you can expect to come; it’s gruesome, dirty, and painful. You stumble upon a birth scene that would rival that in “Knocked Up” to make you cringe over what you just saw, all while having a hideous over-sized mutant standing over the woman to see the end product of the birth, which fails to survive and results in death for both the infant and the woman.

A desert location in New Mexico is where the film goes next. Scientists appear to be installing a security system for a restricted military site called sector 16, when something malfunctions, every one starts disappearing and goes silent. We then get introduced to a group of national guardsmen who are in the middle of a training that fails miserably and are chewed out by their superior, Sgt. Jeffrey 'Sarge' Millstone (Flex Alexander) who could be best imagined as the bastard child of Jamie Foxx and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) from “Full Metal Jacket”.

After the chew out, the group is given the task of delivering supplies to help with the installation at sector 16. As they venture to the site you get introduced to the characters in a way similar to the helicopter flight in “Predator”. Immediately you find the asshole of the group by the name of PFC 'Crank' Medina (Jacob Vargas) who immediately is at the throat of PFC David 'Napoleon' Napoli (Michael McMillian) the slacker of the unit.

Upon arrival they search around the site for any signs of life until they discover a body, from that point forward it’s a struggle to survive as they get picked off one by one, in ways that have to be creative to meet standards these days all the way until they get down to the last few at which point one of them gets taken below ground, and of course the rest follow to rescue. This is where the movie really uses the dark to give you those jump scares and play tricks with your eyes. The mutant Chameleon (Derek Mears) is really in his element because he is so disfigured he can literally blend into almost any environment. At points you will see movement and wonder if that is some one about to pop out at you or are your eyes playing those tricks?

What differentiates The Hills Have Eyes from the sequel is in the first you had a family versus a family of mutants, in here we have the national guard versus an almost army like band of mutants. That ends up being the next generation from the previous film. The goal is very primal for the mutants; find women and re-populate their numbers, not exactly an easy task being out in a deserted wasteland.

In the special features section I found the Mutant Attack documentary very insightful as it really sums up the movie and the characters without dragging on as special feature filler, as the gag reel was.

If you are in search of a current film that makes a good popcorn muncher with no thinking or complex plot, this is for you. It is straight to the point and has enough blood and gore to satiate any splatter fanatic especially with the drought of good splatter films as of late besides Saw, Hostel, and a few others. I will add that the port-a-potty scene is worth the price of however you see it; it will make you fear port-a-potties like Jaws made you fear the ocean.

-derek0