The total gross at the
box office of
The Hills Have Eyes 2 was $37.6 million, about half of the original's total gross.
Critical response Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 13% based on reviews from 64 critics and a rating average of 3.2 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads, "
The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a completely unoriginal sequel that offers plenty of gore and clichés, but few scares."
TV Guide gives the film one out of five stars.
Film critic Peter Bradshaw of
The Guardian wrote in his review which was printed in the
Taipei Times: "The
sequel of the
remake of
Wes Craven's
The Hills Have Eyes has mutated into a boring mess of a movie." Review aggregator
Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 32% based on 10 reviews. Critic
Matt Zoller Seitz of
The New York Times wrote in his review: "
Wes Craven's 1977 film,
The Hills Have Eyes, in which suburbanites battled mutant cannibals, was a pulpy parable of the thin line separating civilization from savagery. The 2006 remake
The Hills Have Eyes was basically the same movie with glossier production values and a less satirical, more bludgeoning approach to violence. This follow-up — in which
National Guard trainees are trapped on a former atomic test site and are stalked by flesh-eating freaks headquartered in a warrenlike mountain hideout — is essentially a catalog of transgressive images, lighted and edited like a heavy-metal video." Scott Tobias of
The A.V. Club wrote in his review: "The premise for
The Hills Have Eyes 2, the quickie follow-up to
Alexandre Aja's skillful but gratuitous
2006 remake of Craven's original, seems like a perfect opportunity to give the mutants their due, since it deploys a group of military people back to the scene of the crime. And yet it stupidly does the opposite, reducing the mutants to mine-dwelling freaks who murder and rape because, well, that's what they do. After a prologue so repugnant that it's unworthy of description, the film touches down in
New Mexico's "Sector 15", where a handful of military technicians are busy installing a top-secret surveillance system. When a group of National Guard trainees are dispatched to the site to deliver equipment, they're shocked to discover the men either missing or dead, and they start combing the surrounding hills on a search-and-rescue mission. What they don't realize is that the mutants are luring them into various traps designed to kill the men and abduct the women for (ugh) breeding purposes. So it's up to these unseasoned and often downright inept soldiers to fight their way out of trouble. Directed by music-video veteran
Martin Weisz—in the future, can producers please look elsewhere for talent?—
The Hills Have Eyes 2 assembles the most motley group of incompetents this side of a
Police Academy movie, yet somehow misses the laughs." ==Soundtrack==