Less violent, less distressing and generally less down on life than Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes, this rote sequel is almost a tonal crossover from the horror genre to action, focusing on a platoon of armed-to-the-teeth soldiers who end up traipsing around the same abandoned nuclear test site full of hidden sinkholes, caves and other places out of which the prairie dog mutants from the previous film can pounce. Empowering this new crop of victims with massive assault rifles and other weapons is an odd choice, since the signature of the Hills franchise is a more pure form of victimization than an Aliens knock-off can deliver. Prior to now, the series has taken the trouble to flesh out the mutants as rape-crazy, biker-style predators who stalked unaware innocents, while The Hills Have Eyes II mostly uses them as pop-up monsters for blurry boo-moments -- here and there, a pickax-wielding mutant will suddenly appear behind one of our heroes, or a crusty arm will reach out of the darkness to yank someone backwards.

Unconvincing would be a generous way to describe the so-called National Guard troop served up for slaughter. Played by actors with no visible muscle tone and sporting un-colorful nicknames like "Private Mickey Mouse," the troop spends the first twenty minutes of the film enduring brow-beatings from the world's most cliched drill sergeant, who screams in everyone's faces and orders a slacker to stand on one foot with his rifle over his head. One of the troop members looks and sounds distractingly like Patton Oswalt doing a 'retarded soldier' character, while another wears a big bandana up around his forehead, which is also a grab from Aliens, if I remember correctly. The leads are played by too-model-perfect-to-be-a-grunt Jessica Stroup, too-wimpy-to-pass-for-a-soldier Michael McMillian and Daniella Alonso, whose entire character arc is boiled down to the fact that she carries a cell-phone video of her young son and watches it numerous times during the film, much to the boredom of the audience.

You've probably heard something about the story by now: In early 2001 a German man was arrested for killing, disemboweling, cooking and eating another man. What makes this story particularly (ok, especially) bizarre is that the victim was a willing participant in the event! He actually wanted to be eaten! Obviously a story like this is entirely ripe for a movie adaptation, which is where Martin Weisz' Grimm Love (aka Rohtenburg or Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story) comes in. (Another film covering the exact same story, Marian Dara's Cannibal, is presently available on video. It's a lot more graphic, but not quite as engaging as Grimm Love.)

"Based on actual events," but using a fictional character for a framing story, Grimm Love focuses on American graduate student Katie Armstrong (Keri Russell), a committed researcher who finds herself absolutely obsessed with the story of flesh-eater Oliver Hartwin (Thomas Kretschmann), a rather sick man who's doing jail time for dining on his fellow man.

Given that we only know a few small snippets about Hartwin's life, Weisz cleverly juxtaposes Armstrong's story with early details from Hartwin's life. As Katie gets the sketchier stories about the killer's childhood, we're offered the anecdotes in flashback form, and as she gets a whole lot closer to the seriously slimy truth, the b-story material gets decidedly more ... icky. The whole (and admittedly languid) affair comes to a head with a powerfully compelling two-headed sequence: Katie gets to see the carnage on videotape as we switch back and forth to Hartwin's final descent. And it ain't pretty.

New corporate stepchild Fox Atomic pulled out all the stops at ComicCon yesterday for their latest offering, The Hills Have Eyes II. (If I have to explain that this is a sequel to a remake, you probably shouldn't be reading this post.) The day's activities started with an invitation-only breakfast, attended by producer and co-screenwriter Wes Craven and the film's two female leads, Jessica Stroup and Daniella Alonso. Most of the attendees of the breakfast arrived early and planted themselves at one of several round breakfast tables, in anticipation of some kind of formal welcome from Craven himself, but nothing of the kind was on the menu. Instead, Craven and party arrived without fanfare and sat themselves down at one of the tables, ready to eat. Just as the first coffee cups were starting to get cold, the busy PR people dimmed the lights and treated us to a never-before-seen clip of the upcoming film. The scene in question involves a 'mutant birth' sequence -- not a mutant giving birth, but a seemingly normal woman giving birth to a horrible mutant. After basically ripping his way out of mom's vagina, the mutant baby promptly stands up and punches mom in the face. No, I'm not kidding.

After this, we were allowed to view another clip, which seemed like a trailer but went on for several minutes and seemed to contain scattered bits of new footage. Not about to leave Craven and the ladies to eat in peace, several journos eventually began to saunter over to the director's breakfast table to pepper him with questions; for the next thirty minutes or so, Craven stood by his table, talking in the direction of several outstretched hands and digital tape recorders. Stroup and Alonso also received the treatment, although they seemed to be more in demand for photo opportunities than for serious, get-to-know-you, how-did-you-approach-this-character type of interviews. The breakfast dispersed about an hour after it began, and everyone went their separate ways. About four hours later, the Hills crew would reassemble in ComicCon's main auditorium for a panel discussion open to the general convention audience. The event may have been more sparsely attended than expected, because shortly into it, the organizers suddenly decided to let in the massive crowd waiting outside for Kevin Smith, an hour early.

Fox Atomic has slipped to Cinematical one of the first approved stills from the upcoming sequel to last year's remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes. To see the full-sized image, click on the photo below. German Martin Weisz, director of the Keri Russell crime drama Rohtenburg, has directing duties on The Hills Have Eyes II, which sees a group of National Guard trainees coming face to face with desert-dwelling mutants during their training routines. Based on this pic, it doesn't look like they do too well in the ensuing fight. If you want to take a trip down memory lane, check out our interview with Wes Craven, from around the time of the release of the first Hills remake, and our review of that first remake, which dropped in March of '06.