MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE BLANK CHECK

Okay, I’m running late with this month’s Foyeurism so I’ll dispense with the intro. As you already see, I’m conducting a little experiment with the text this month: white font. What do you think? Easier to read? More taxing on the eyes? Prefer the green? Or the old yellow? Something else? Drop me an email at foywonder@yahoo.com and let me know? Now on with April’s better-late-than-never Foyeurism…

 

THE HILLS HAVE OSMONDS

 

As I've told readers in the past, I run master control at a TV station that's an ABC affiliate and my shift affords me the pleasure of getting to experience ABC's primetime programming. This includes many of the wonderful reality show competitions that they've uncorked on the unsuspecting public the past few years. Sure, they've had a few that for better or worse caught on to some degree: Dancing with the Stars, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and American Inventor.

The crown jewel of ABC's reality line-up of course being the shamelessly sappy Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. If you're just poor and in desperate need of a house they probably won't come build you one, but if mom has cancer and dad was killed in Iraq and the kids are terminally ill, physically or mentally handicapped, suffering from Elephant Man’s disease, or will burst into flames if exposed to direct sunlight then Ty Pennington will be outside their rundown house with a bullhorn in no time flat.

But ABC’s reality misses have far outnumbered their hits by a wide margin. Perhaps you've seen some of the outstanding reality television programming that ABC introduced and subsequently cancelled just in the time since I've been working at an ABC affiliate TV station. Let me briefly recap a few that came and went.

AM I HOT? - An exceptionally shallow beauty pageant even by traditional beauty pageant standards where buff boys and stacked babes paraded around on stage in next to nothing so that Lorenzo Lamas could make like Simon Cowell while pointing out their physical imperfections his trusty laser pointer. So determined to win a modeling contract, never did any of these people ever rebel over the notion that they were having their worth as a human being judged by a guy who for him the SNAKE EATER movies are considered a career highpoint. Proof that sex doesn't always sell, the show was a big bust in the ratings. I'm sorry, but you're not hot enough to get renewed for another season.

I'M A CELEBRITY, GET ME OUT OF HERE! - A dumbed down version of Survivor featuring D-list celebrities the likes of Downtown Julie Brown, Robin Leach, Melissa Rivers, Stuttering John, Bruce Jenner, frequently naked actress/model Nikki Ziering, model Tyson Beckford, etc. Controversy arose over Joan Rivers using her then E! Network program to get viewers to vote for her daughter thus propelling Melissa into the finals. Yeah, that’s something to cheat for. It wouldn't be enough though as the winner would be the one participant least deserving of the title celebrity: Chris Judd, a dance choreographer whose only claim to fame was having just been briefly married to Jennifer Lopez. I remain convinced that this show helped inspire VH1 to become the network it is today.

Speaking of VH1, why is it that whenever I'm channel surfing and land on VH1 I almost inevitably see Vanilla Ice having a screaming at people and throwing things? Has VH1 gone from being the soft rock MTV to the C-list stand-up comics comment on pop culture channel to the D-list “celebreality” channel to the Vanilla Ice has an mental meltdown network or what?

Now back to the ABC reality hall of shame.

THE FAMILY - A wacky family from New Jersey is brought to some posh mansion to compete in wacky competitions and strategic backstabbing until only one of them is left to lay claim to a big cash inheritance. This one was so pathetically silly that it was almost entertaining, due in tremendous part to host George Hamilton having to pretend that he could even stand being within teen feet of these goombas. The show's highlight being Hamilton nearly getting injured when a family member driving an out-of-control golf cart nearly wiped out the lifeguard's chair the tanned one was perched in. I take that back. The true highlight was seeing Hamilton fake crocodile tears at the end of the final episode as he told the family how much he'd learned about the meaning of family from watching them yell at one another, backstab each other, chain smoke, and occasionally hug.

THE MOLE & CELEBRITY MOLE – I was fortunate enough that this show never aired on my shift. Let's just forget this one ever aired. I'm sure host Anderson Cooper wishes we all would.

THE BENEFACTOR - Gazillionaire Mark Cuban tried his hand at playing Trump in this short-lived Apprentice knock-off. He's fired!

THE ONE - Let's rip-off American Idol and The Real World all at the same time by creating a singing competition where the contestants live together under one roof. The best of both worlds? Nope. Two major problems: the contestants sounded like people that wouldn't make through the first round of American Idol, requiring the judges to lie and put over how good they were when they really weren't, and, of course, nobody watched the damn thing. The one tanked right out of the gate and only lasted a few more episodes.

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD - Now here's one that's destined for television infamy and I can lay claim to being one of the few people who ever saw any footage from it (on a network reel spotlighting all their upcoming programming.) The concept was to have a bunch of families competing for a house in what looked like a relatively affluent neighborhood subdivision somewhere. The catch was that the other people living in the neighborhood – all uppity white Anglo-Saxons - would vote on which family would get the house and the contestants consisted of the black family, the Latino family, the tattooed rocker family, the gay couple with a kid, etc. I think you can see the train wreck to come already. Several advocacy groups did as well after getting a peek at the pilot episode and were outraged by the very notion of the show despite network assurances that everyone would learn a valuable life lesson about acceptance before it was over. That wasn’t’ good enough for the protesters. There went the neighborhood - straight into oblivion. Not a single episode ever aired.

When I first heard about GREAT AMERICAN DREAM VOTE in which people would go on TV to try and win over the audience to vote for them to have their lifelong dream fulfilled I immediately sensed that this was going to be another show that aimed towards the shameless milking of the weepy melodramatics ala Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I became doubly convinced upon reading the show was to be hosted by Donny Osmond.

Osmond: a word associated with saccharine almost as much as sugar. Whitebread, blander than bland, family friendly Donny Osmond hosting a show about people competing to get their great American dreams fulfilled...

I could already smell the schmaltz. American Inventor, ABC's "Popular Mechanics" version of American Idol, had already gone down this same route, rolling out some goofballs with wacky inventions and some people with legit inventions, but ultimately resorting to its tearjerker formula where the inventors hard luck sob stories began to supersede the concept of a show about rewarding human ingenuity. If you're going to have a TV show about people competing to see their dreams come true that will no doubt go down the road of emotional blackmail then might as well trot out someone as milquetoast as Donny Osmond to host it. Well, either Donny Osmond or Henry Thomas.

Donny Osmond - The Man, The Legend, The Teeth...

I had zero intention of watching the Great American Dream Vote, though I knew full well I'd see it since it's Wednesday 8/7 Central timeslot coincided with my shift. ABC was clearly high enough on the show to schedule a sneak preview the night before, pre-empting one of my favorite programs, Boston Legal, in lieu of Donny Osmond making non-sexual dreams come true. I was not working that night; home watching Law & Order: SVU at the time when my phone rang around a quarter to ten. It was John, my friend, co-worker, and Foywonder.com webmaster. I could sense distress in his voice immediately. The first words out of his mouth were, "Are you watching this crap we're running?" I instantly knew what crap he was referring to and also knew that if he was calling me on my day off in the midst of the program airing then it had to be something truly, spectacularly awful. He filled me in on what I had missed - mostly vague in the details as the sound of mental anguish in his voice increased throughout the conversation. My belief that the program would pull at the heart strings and he instantly corrected me that Great American Dream Vote had more in common with the old Queen for a Day show from back in the day than emotional manipulators like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and American Inventor. Apparently I wasn't the only one who expected the program to be something else. John told me that at one point they cut to the studio audience, many of whom had a look on their face like they couldn't even believe what they were being expected to vote on. This did not shock me after being told that one contestant's dream was to open a chicken theme park/poultry preserve called "Chicken Heaven".

Folks, if you have a life long dream that in any way, shape, or form involves the use of the word "chicken" then you don't not need to have you life's dream fulfilled - YOU NEED A NEW LIFE!

I knew after that conversation with John that I was in for quite the spectacle the next night and though I kicked myself for having not experienced the horror of the Great American Dream Vote sneak preview, I was ready for the official series premiere. Thank goodness I had a tape rolling for it.

The show begins and out comes Donny Osmond who has clearly paid a visit to Mr. Botox, and maybe even his colleague Dr. Facelift. He looked unnaturally youthful. Something about Osmond's hair, facials, and mannerisms hosting this show made me think that I was watching the love child of Chuck Barris and Ray Liotta. One thing was for certain, Osmond did one of the worst jobs faking enthusiasm that I've ever seen. Either that or he was just trying so hard that he managed to make himself come across as a complete phony. Too much fist pumping and yelling, "Yeah!" or "Whoo!"

It's hard to tell where the Ray Liotta ends and the Chuck Barris begins

We meet our two finalists from the sneak preview, awaiting the results of the home audience's phone, online, and text message polling from the night before. As Osmond informs us, "These aren't the kinds of dreams that will save someone's life, but they can change someone's life." Uh, huh. Our previous night's finalists are Russ, a 22-year old prematurely bald guy dreaming of a new head of hair, and Devin, a lady whose great American dream is - I swear I'm not making this up - to open a retirement home for old Bassett hounds. No, Donny, these are not the kinds of dreams that will save someone's life, but they can change channels.

So awful was Great American Dream Vote even the studio audience was reaching for their remotes

A recap shows young balding Russ declaring that America should vote for him to get a hair transplant because everyone else's dream on the show that night was for someone else and his dream was all about him. You'd have thought his boast of having a completely selfish dream would have swayed the votes away from him, but America chose him to have his dream fulfilled, perhaps because America simply couldn't accept the fact that the only other option involved the creation of a doggy old folk’s home. Her plea of "please help me help the hounds" just wasn't enough to sway the general populace. Maybe she should have tried dressing up the Bassett hounds in Little Sherlock Holmes hats with a little pipe in their mouth; people like that. Did she not see BEST IN SHOW?

The producers of Great American Dream Vote would like to remind contestants that the use of Scanner powers for manipulating viewer votes or exploding a rival's head is strictly forbidden

Now surely there has to be some way to inject a little sex appeal into this show. Donny Osmond and his snazzy Botany 500 suit can't carry that load all by himself. Out comes one of the "Great American Dreamgirls," the show's answer to the models opening the briefcases on Deal or No Deal. No hot girl-on-suitcase action for this show; these ladies just walk out in their red dresses and hand Osmond an Oscar-quality envelope for him to open and read off the name of the voting winner. The Dreamgirls so pointless, they're attire not all that risqué and the women themselves not especially hot; why bother?

"Hey, baby, I'm not just Mormon. I'm MORE MAN!"

Osmond opens the envelope and announces Russ as the winner. You’d have thought he'd just been announced as the winner of a million dollars and not just a head of hair. Think about it for a sec. The man just won hair. I just watched a show where a man won hair. HAIR~!

Donny consoles Devin, assuring her that one day her dream will come true (FAT CHANCE!) and quickly shoos her off the stage. That's when an overjoyed Russ takes the opportunity to go after Donny Osmond the way the fat Samoan women always go after Bob Barker. He doesn't just hug Osmond; he bear hugs him off his feet and swings him around. For one brief terrifying moment I though Russ might give Osmond a belly-to-belly suplex and then maybe try and finish him off with a giant splash, possibly confused into thinking that if he were to score a pinfall on Osmond he'd win more prizes. He wouldn't need to do so since more prizes were to come. But first...

They trot out the doctor that will perform Russ' hair transplant. Out comes this old man walking slightly hunched over like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons wearing a white lab coat. My God, it's Bela Lugosi from BRIDE OF THE MONSTER!

Today, hair transplants. Tomorrow, my own race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world!

Then Osmond, Russ, and Simon Barr Sinister all turn around, look at the big TV screen, and we all get to see a doctored photo of what Russ may look like with his new hair.

Russ' dream was to be the King of Queens?

But wait, that's not all. Oh, no. They haven't even gotten warmed up yet. You see not only has Russ won his dream of having a full head of hair, he's also won the Showcase Showdown. Following the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition rule that just giving the people a new house isn't enough; they also have to load him up with expensive prizes because, you know, getting expensive prizes for free lessens the pain of poverty, ill health, and personal tragedy - or baldness in this case. Russ is literally bombarded with an onslaught of additional prizes that come one after another.

Video camera
Digital camera
Flat screen TV
$10,000 designer wardrobe
Sailboard
Skydiving lessons
Private jet trip for an all expense paid Las Vegas outing
$20,000 cash
And a brand new convertible

See everything he won was tailored to his dream by either being appearance related or something that will lead to the wind whipping thru his new hair. Well, except for the cash and the trip to Vegas – not sure about how those two fit. It kind of makes you wonder what in the world the extra prizes would have been had the old Bassett hound sanctuary lady won. Better yet, can you imagine what he'd won if Russ' dream had been for penis enlargement surgery?

Camera and TV so that he can videotape himself having sex
New wardrobe of designer speedos and leather pants
Expensive gold chains
An even flashier sports car
A trip to Los Angeles
A $10,000 gift certificate to the Mustang Ranch

You just know sooner or later someone on this show they'd have a man asking for penis enlargement or at least a woman wanting her breasts enlarged.

After the commercial break, the show comes back and settles into its basic formula. Two contestants are brought out one at a time. They're introduced and explain what their dream is. A video package then airs further highlighting their dreams. They top it off with a pair of fifteen second pitch sessions where they try to convince the audience that theirs is the dream they should vote for. The two "dreamers" as they're called have been paired against each other based on their dreams having somewhat similar themes.

Two contestants... One lives. One dies. Fifteen seconds to convince the audience to let them live. Donny Osmond hosts the ultimate extreme reality competition: TIME TO DIE

The first round of "dreamers" pits a 49-year old man who dreams of competing in the Ironman Triathlon against a 42-year old who dreams of being the oldest NFL rookie. Okay, a dream of competing in pro football and asking for a tryout with an NFL team is actually a legit dream I can accept. On the other hand, getting an invitation to compete in the Ironman Triathlon just doesn't seem as momentous. The studio audience agreed. Oldest rookie moves on to the finals at the end of the show.

The next set of dreamers had a pair of pretty twenty-something's with fashion-themed dreams. One, looking like she was ready to attend a sock hop, declared her dream... Let's just let the picture tell this story.

Don't even need a snarky caption for that one. Her dream was to start a clothing line for dogs, eventually moving up to purses and perhaps even human undergarments. These are the dreams that the studio audience and home viewers are expected to ponder and consider fulfilling? We've gone from Thomas Edison to poodle sweaters in the course of a century.

The other frizzy haired blonde had a line of swimwear she wanted to get off the ground. Her video had her trekking through her snowy hometown in snow boots and one of the bikinis she's designed, looking quite cold and unsteady on her feet.

I think she did herself in with the studio audience through her repeated usage of the words "freakin'" and "hot," making herself sound vacuous and dumb. Doggy clothing girl advanced to the finals.

I think in a cruel twist of fate they should have shaved bikini girl's Sideshow Bob hair and transplanted it onto Russ' scalp.

The final dueling dreamers both shared a common goal: getting their grown children out of the house. They brought out the first woman to talk about wanting her unemployed, slob of a son out of the house. Then they brought out another woman who revealed the same exact dream, only in her case it was a grown daughter she wanted out. These people need Dr. Phil, not Donny Osmond. Better yet, maybe they should hook their kids up with one another, get them married, and when they move into their own place it solve everyone's problems.

The second mom with the slovenly daughter ended up getting the audience's votes. Most likely this was due to the audience being horrified by her living conditions; the interior of her home looked like Hurricane Katrina had blown through. Plus there was the matter of the daughter owning 8 or 9 cats, I forget, and her ex-boyfriend’s king snake got loose in the house and because of the condition of the place they'd yet to find it. Just wait until one of the cats turns up half eaten and then the snake should be easy to locate.

Her dream of seeing Tom Bergeron naked was almost too much for her to handle

So the football guy, the poodle clothing chick, and the crazy-eyed mom with the adult daughter end up being the three finalists at the end of the show. But rather than have America vote between the three, first the audience has to eliminate one. Another fifteen second voting session and crazy-eyed mom is back to her animal-infested pigsty. Too bad too since I was kind of hoping she'd be the next big winner. I'd love to know how all that would've gone down. I'd like to imagine the prize announcer would have said something along the lines of...

"We're sending your daughter into the Army! She'll be picked up at your house and taken to her local Army recruiting center where she'll then be hauled right off to boot camp. In no time flat she'll be off to Iraq for her first tour of duty while you enjoy a luxury singles cruise to the Bahamas! And if your only daughter gives her life in duty to her country, you'll be collecting that posthumous medal on her behalf while wearing a designer gown from your new $10,000 wardrobe courtesy of Gucci! And you'll be driving to her funeral in your brand new Cadillac!"

Yeah, I could imagine it going something like that. But we’ll never know.

Once submitted, your dreams will become property of the Great American Dream Vote and the American Broadcasting Company. Any attempt to fulfill your life dreams without express written consent from ABC or its parent company, the Walt Disney Company, will be subject to prosecution.

So the final two are forty-year old wannabe NFL rookie and cute, twangy-voiced Southern girl with her dream of a world where dogs wear designer clothes. Who will the home audience vote for? Who will the viewers text message their votes for? Who will get the nod from online voters? Tune in next week to fin...

ABC cancelled the Great American Dream Vote the very next day. Sorry, Donny.

How's that for a quick demise? Sneak peak on Tuesday night, series premiere in its regular timeslot on Wednesday night, and cancelled by Thursday afternoon. That's what happens on ABC when a show that made for some pretty terrible television to begin with only pulls in a 1.5 rating, coming in fourth place in its timeslot in its debut. Bad television… Bad ratings… The great American dream is over.

And then the day after that Marie Osmond filed for divorce from her husband of 20 years. Suffice to say this was not a good week to be an Osmond. Or a master operator at an ABC affiliate television station.

Farewell, Great American Dream Vote. We hardly watched you.

THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM VOTE
MARCH 27, 2007 – MARCH 29, 2007

 

We now leave the world of bad television to return to the world of bad Hollywood films, and no subgenre of badness is worse than a truly crappy sequel to a film that really didn't warrant a sequel.

The Sci-Fi Channel presents...

Wait just a cotton-pickin' minute! This wasn't a Sci-Fi Channel original movie. Was it?

Let's see...

Generic monster menace - CHECK

Isolated setting - CHECK

Stock military archetypes - CHECK

Rampant stupidity - CHECK

Clichés abound - CHECK

Not an actual Sci-Fi Channel original movie, just an amazing simulation

I wasn't a huge fan of the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES but after sitting through this vastly inferior sequel I find myself with a new appreciation for the unnecessary remake that spawned it. The average family from the remake that found themselves at the mercy of sadistic mutant men leftover from government A-bomb testing in the New Mexico desert hills was far more sympathetic than the insipid National Guardsmen of this sequel and the mutants in the remake actually felt more like flesh & blood villains with distinct personalities compared to the mutants that only have gimmicks this time around. The mutants this time came across more like the mindless inbreds of WRONG TURN, especially given a sticking point being the inbred hillbillies... I mean atomic mutants desire to breed. Given the movie they made it would have been better off being set in the 1950's and been an atomic age monster movie about bumbling soldiers battling cavemen resurrected by the atomic bomb in the rocky cliffs of the New Mexico desert.

Wes Craven made the lousy HILLS HAVE EYES II in 1985 and now the makers of the HILLS HAVE EYES remake have followed it up with their own lousy HILLS HAVE EYES II - no affiliation with the sequel to the original with which it shares a title. So congratulations to the HILLS HAVE EYES for having both an original version and a remake that both have horrible sequels with identical titles. Surely that counts for something, right?

Things kick off with a graphic scene of a tied-up naked women giving birth to a new atomic mutant. And then the baby's daddy bashes her skull in with a club. It's all empty shock value, which in actuality makes it a perfect opening for a movie loaded with empty shock value. There's gore galore in this film but none that carries any impact.

And loud noise jump scares... The remake at least tried to create an actual sense of dread; this sequel relies on startling the audience with loud noises.

An on-screen graphic following the opening titles recaps the events of the previous film, adding that the military then went in to investigate this area in New Mexico where A-Bombs were once tested now known as Sector 16. This has led them to decide to install sensors throughout the area. Our very next sequence: atomic mutant men graphically murder the four man military crew attempting to install those sensors. No longer a full blown colony living in what remains of a long abandoned atom bomb testing area; now it's a small group of mutants residing within a mineshaft inside a mountain popping in and out of covert openings to attack like homicidal mole men.

There you go. This film should have been a gory name-only remake of the 1950's sci-fi flick THE MOLE PEOPLE with the mutants of that film in place of the mutants of this film. If you ask me I think we're overdue some modern day homicidal mole man action.

I don't want to say Paris Hilton is a slut, but when getting a Pap smear requires both a gynecologist and the aid of one of the world's top spelunkers...

We suddenly find ourselves in a Golan-Globus war movie. A small squad of soldiers is battling insurgents in Kandahar - screwing up mightily I might add. Of course, in keeping with the other thing besides empty shock value that the movie is rife with - that being worn out clichés, it all turns out to have just been a training exercise and not actual combat. Does the National Guard usually have soldiers and people playing the roles of insurgents using live rounds and lobbing actual exploding grenades at one another during training exercises? Still doesn't prevent this reveal from being a cheap cliché I've seen done one too many times.

The ridiculously photogenic soldiers botched this training exercise big time. Their commanding officer verbally assaults them one-by-one for acting in a reckless manner that would have assured their deaths and the deaths of many innocent civilians. The guy playing Sarge looks like a smaller, less muscular Michael Jai White, and his performance reeks of serious wannabe R. Lee Ermey-ism. Not that it matters since following the rules of ALIENS and countless other movies, the guy in charge of the recruits, the one they all depend on for guidance, the one who should lead them to safety, will be amongst the first to die.

Let's take this moment to meet the important members of the 101st Fighting Stereotypes. Well, only the ones that actually matter to the plot. Most are just meat to be chopped up. All have nicknames like "Stump" and "Napoleon" and "Crank" and "Splitter" - all G.I. Joe worthy names even though I highly doubt any of these soldiers would last five minutes in Sgt. Slaughter's boot camp.

One of the soldiers is kind of nerdy and it's revealed that he's actually opposed to the war in Iraq. One would wonder what a guy with a "CONVERSATION, NOT CONFRONTATION" bumper sticker on his vehicle is even doing signing up for the military during this current time of war, but just the fact that he's considered the wimp of the bunch and the one that's least gung ho about going into combat ensures his status as the main protagonist. The sissy liberal intellectual guy in the remake ended up being the guy that had to go all Cro-Magnon on the mutants in the end so the filmmakers are just following the pattern here. It worked better in the previous film than this time around. The guy in the first film really did seem to undergo a metamorphosis from laid back neo-hippie to someone reduced to a primal state. This guy just goes from being a reluctant solider to an ass-kicking Henry Thomas clone without a genuine arc to his character.

Then there are the female soldiers: one the seemingly-too-attractive-to-be-a-grunt blonde and the other the seemingly-too-attractive-to-be-a-grunt Latina single mom. It's established that the mutants kill males and keep females for mating purposes so you just know that since there are two females here, at least one of them is going to get abducted after doing something really stupid like breaking from the group in order to go behind a rock to pee even after they're all fully aware that unseen forces are picking them off one-by-one.

Just a typical day in the life of Katie Holmes

Another soldier proves to be cool under fire and comes into his own as a natural born leader; he's also black - thus guaranteeing that he won't be making it to the end. The competent black guy in movies like who isn't the main character or the comic relief is typically a dead man walking.

Then there's the guy repeatedly referred to as "Rambo resurrected". He's a major league hothead who gives the anti-war geek a hard time for being a screw-up and thinks of himself as quite the hard ass killing machine in the heat of battle. So you know he's going to fall to pieces before it’s over and get himself killed through his own sheer stupidity.

The few. The proud. The clichéd.

The National Guard should protest this movie for portraying their recruits as such morons.

The members of the 101st Fighting Stereotypes are then trucked off to Sector 16 out in the middle of the New Mexico desert for yet another training exercise. They arrive to this lunarscape of a landscape area from which it is impossible for even the US military to get a radio signal out and find the base camp empty. This is the same camp we just saw get wiped out by atomic mutants minutes earlier.

Someone is attempting to signal them from the top of one of these hills, interpreted by the Sarge as a distress signal. With limited ammo, they trek up the rocky hills, leaving behind our two main characters: one for being a screw-up that questions the Sarge's orders and the other to try and get a radio frequency out. The soldiers heading up the hill will soon find themselves under attack by an unseen enemy while the two back at camp will have their own encounter with a survivor of initial base attack, who will crawl out of the feces-filled bowels of a port-a-potty and live just long enough to mutter the words, "They're here." You can pretty much predict the rest of the movie from there; just make sure to include a scene where one of the female soldiers is bent over and violently raped by a mutant, complete with a close-up of his drooling mouth as he orgasms.

Speaking of which, let's meet the cannibalistic atomic mutant all-stars.

Introducing the Toxic Commando! He looks like the Toxic Avenger. He dresses like a 1950's army officer. He gets little screen time. He dies like a bitch.

Next up is Moley McRockThrower! He's ugly, skinny, likes to throw rocks at guys, can dive straight into a hole in a mountain like nobody's business, and also gets little screen time. He's also not bulletproof.

Then there's Mr. Magoo! Looking something like Mr. Magoo suffering from Elephant Man's disease, he's got a big bald head, wears Coke bottle glasses, and has to feel his way around because he's pretty much blind as a bat - except when he's charging directly at the person unloading a machine gun into him. Too bad he's only semi-bulletproof.

Ebeneezer Scrooge as you've never seen before in George A. Romero's A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Hey, look, a special appearance by Kane from SEE NO EVIL! No, wait; it's just another mutant that looks a lot like a certain WWE wrestler turned movie slasher had he fallen into a vat of toxic waste. He's got a serpentine tongue (Great for lickin' the ladies!) and one side of his body is covered with dark, rocky boils that make it possible for him to camouflage himself against the rocky landscape. His size, ugliness, and camouflage gimmick makes him seem like a lost 80's Masters of the Universe action figure come to life. I forget how he died.

And finally we have Solomon Grundy from the old Superfriends animated series! Essentially Frankenstein's Monster in some tattered rags picked up at the Salvation Army; being the biggest, strongest, and horniest of his tribe of atomic murder mutants allocates him the distinction of not only being their leader but the toughest to kill. He'll get the back of his skull blown off, impaled through the chest with a large pipe, have a chunk of his brain ripped out by hand, stabbed again, suffer repeated sledgehammer shots to the groin, and have a bayonet impaled straight through his mouth before finally dying and staying dead. If they were going to take things to that ridiculous a degree why not steal a page from THE NAKED GUN and afterwards have a marching band march over his corpse while playing "Louie, Louie"?

300 had better, more interesting, more menacing mutants than this. After seeing that huge, fang-toothed troll in 300 I came away wanting a remake of the old 80's slasher flick HUMONGOUS with that troll guy as the star. Certainly would have been better than watching the 3 Gimp Mafia at work here.

But wait, aren't there any good mutants in this one? And along comes Rocky Dennis! A young mutant, small in stature, that looks not all that dissimilar to the facially deformed kid from the movie MASK; he turns out to be the one mutant who wants to help save the regular folk from his psychotic brethren (although if you happen to lose some entrails along the way he'll be more than happy to snack on 'em.) Why does he want to help save the remaining soldiers anyway? Send your answers on a postcard to... Hey, there was a mutant girl in the remake that tried to help the family so why not tap that well again. Otherwise, no explanation is given.

If there was supposed to be some sort of Iraqi war parable with these American soldiers battling these native insurgents that manage to out flank the soldiers even though they are less skilled and not as well armed, it didn't resonate at all. If the filmmakers set out to go the ALIENS route with this sequel - I don't recall the Colonial Marines from that film being a bunch of bumbling dimwits that make McHale's Navy look like Chuck Norris' Delta Force.

In retrospect, the remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES may have been a bleak, seriously unpleasant experience from which no real joy could be found, but I'll gladly take the deeply flawed punch to the gut that remake was over the idiotic kick to the groin this sequel proved to be.

Further examples of said idiocy:

"Rambo resurrected" sticks his head through a mineshaft door where a mutant might be lurking. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. AHHH!!! BATS!!! AHHH!!! Another cheap jump scare and what jump scare is any cheaper than someone being startled by an animal surprise?

They need someone to repel down a cliff with the body of one of their dead. They've never done this before and aren't even sure if the knots tied in the rope will be strong enough to hold two people. Hey, let's send the fattest guy down the side carrying the body!

A horny mutant gets a piece of his tongue bitten off yet shows no ill effects from having lost it and is even speaking five seconds later sounding no worse than before.

Enough dynamite to have blown a hole through the mountain only manages to blow up a single mineshaft chamber and the other mutants either ignored it or didn't hear it. This will be followed up minutes later with Solomon Grundy being drawn to the sound of a cellular phone making noise.

The good mutant has led us to the exit. We're actually going to escape this nightmare with our lives. No, I'm going back to save another soldier left behind even though I have no way of knowing whether or not this person is even still alive, I don't even know where to find this person, how many more killer mutants I may encounter, and I'm out of ammo. Ah, the fine line between nobility and stupidity...

The apex of the film's idiocy comes when they find the near dead body of (General? Sgt? Major? Lt?) Redding, the guy originally in charge of the sensor hook-up project, up the side of one of the hills; an amazing discovery considering when last we saw him he was getting impaled with a spear and chucked off a cliff by the Toxic Commando. Somehow he got himself back up one of the hills; an even more amazing feat given he's missing an eye, some teeth, looks beaten up to hell, and has a piece of his skull protruding from the top of his head. But thank goodness he did or else who would have been able to explain to the recruits that they're being hunted down and killed by atomic mutants lurking within the mountain's mineshaft. Somebody had to fill these people in on the plot, didn't they? And when asked how they get off the mountain - he whips out his sidearm, shoots himself in the head, and takes the Nestea Plunge off the cliff. I wouldn't have been shocked if the movie had ended with the survivors getting down to ground level to find him splattered yet still alive on the ground giving them the thumbs up.

Yet another unfortunate soul overreacts after watching the remake of BLACK CHRISTMAS

That still would've been better than the actual ending. More text appears on the screen to reveal that the disappearance of the troops was covered by claiming they all went absent without leave; even their families were never told the truth. The government to this day continues to deny the existence of Sector 16. So, uh, what of the film's survivors? How'd the military keep them quiet? Did they have them killed? Ordered to never speak of the incident? Hello? Never a good idea to end your movie with a massive plot hole.

When the highlight of the movie is a funny moment where a character calls the excrement covered guy that just crawled forth from the toilet "Shitman the Barbarian" then you know you've made a shitty movie. The best thing I can say is that at least THE HILLS HAVE EYES II was decently paced, so even though I didn't care about anyone or anything happening on the screen at least what happened did so with enough flow to keep me from feeling completely bored.

I'll go on the record and predict right now that there will be a HILLS HAVE EYES III and it's going to go straight-to-DVD. Yep, I predict they'll keep this name brand going as a series of cheap DTV movies from this point - or the Sci-Fi Channel. Either or, this franchise is ready to be flushed away right along with Shitman the Barbarian and the Great American Dream Vote.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE CONGO