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Release Date: October 23, 2007. Film Rating:  / Scare Factor:  / Written by: Wes Craven & Jonathan Craven Directed by: Martin Weisz The Lucky Ones Die Fast. After last year’s brutal remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, this sequel follows the same path of ultra-graphic violence, gore, disturbing images, foul language, and a gutless script. Maybe I’m becoming tired of the same old, same old. Scares are few and far between as they seem to be set up in the way of most other films. Nothing new is brought to the screen that would separate this film apart from any other. The plot is garbage, the stereotypical characters are boring, the dialogue is awful and it gives the audience the same friction between people we’ve seen in a million other films. In this film, rookie National Guard soldiers are sent into the middle of "nowhere," New Mexico, where the Carter family suffered the most horrific fate by mutants in the first film. This time, a research facility has reported distress at their site, so the soldiers are sent to check it out. The soldiers are a work of art of their own – hardly professional and destined to die quick. With a script like this, you know the ending of the movie before it even happens. Things are going to go wrong when you put personalities of these kinds together: there’s the resourceful one, the courageous one, the wimp, the dumb ogre, and the one who freaks out with zero rationality endangering all. Oh…and don’t let me forget the two women who are there in script because we know they are going to be raped and beaten. We learn immediately during the extremely graphic and disturbing opening scene that these cannibalistic mutants want babies. Women are tied in captivity as they are forced to give birth and die doing it. This film is about as pointless as an eraser, and that eraser would have been put to good use on the script. This Blu-ray disc doesn’t fall short of quality. This is a pristine transfer – the source is excellent and there are no visual distractions in the image. The first half of the film is in the bright desert daylight. The sky is wonderfully blue and the cliffs and rocks have natural beige, brown, and golden yellow tints. The faces of the soldiers never appear hot; thankfully it was opted not to cast warmth over the entire image. The second half of the film is immersed in darkness deep in the caves and mines of the mutants. Lighting is low in this part of the film so viewing it in a dark room is absolutely necessary. The deep level of black looks perfect showing the viewer only what is intended. While some may think this represents poor shadow detail, I’d make the call to suggest we are seeing exactly what was intended. Visible noise in dark scenes is almost entirely absent save for a few moments. Resolution, overall, is excellent. Details in rocks, the landscape, clothing, facial features are all outstanding. The AVC encoding is clean and no edge enhancement has been applied. The DVD in comparison has similar image quality, just with less vibrancy, colour resolution, spatial resolution, and lack of compression artefacts. This Blu-ray disc includes a lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack. Listening to the DTS core, the sound design is excellent. The only weak part is the dialogue; the ADR doesn’t always sound spatially integrated with the rest of the soundtrack. The rest of the mix is loud and there’s the occasional aggressive sound for theatrical exhibition but it translates well for home theatre. The sound itself doesn’t appear bright or overly aggressive allowing the music and sound effects to come through cleanly. Bass is deep and powerful in all channels including the LFE. Effects are well placed in this 360-degree space. Sidewall imaging is obtained and the surrounds are effective to help all sounds wrap around the viewer. Surround activity is not used in a “ping-pong” fashion, something I’ve noticed becoming more common over the past few years. It seems that sound designers are using a less aggressive, tacky, and obvious approach to surround activity. Sound is used to create a haunting feeling in this deserted landscape, and at times we can hear the running of mutants around the soldiers. Overall, it’s a cool soundtrack when all is said and done. Too bad the same can’t be said about the film. The DVD’s audio sounds virtually the same except resolution is slightly less because of the 448kbps Dolby Digital encode.  / TACTILE TRANSDUCER ON/OFF?: OFF Lots of good LFE just to creep you out a bit more. Using a bass shaker is fun with this film, just be sure not to keep the movement up too high. All features are the same as on the DVD. They are 4:3 (and widescreen within the 4:3 window) and have 2.0 sound. The special features on this disc aren’t much to go wild about. While there are many features here, I don’t find any of them to be particularly entertaining. In fact, like the film, it’s the same old, same old. Just over three minutes of deleted scenes, a one minute alternate ending, as well as a three and a half minute gag reel are here to view – none of it is film altering but interesting to view for completists. Four featurettes are included: Trailers for The Hills Have Eyes 2, AVP, From Hell, and Sunshine are also here. IN THE END... Ok…so the movie was awful, but this Blu-ray disc is not. The sound is killer and I’m sure it’ll be amazing for those who are able to decode DTS-HDMA. Fox’s new films on BD continue to look fantastic and I’m grateful they are back supporting the format. The DVD provides a reference for image in sound and is only limited by the technology of the delivery format. Michael Osadciw November 10, 2007 Review System |
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