THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1984)

At one point in The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1984), blind girl in peril Cass (Tamara Stafford) cries out "Why?" Why indeed did Craven go back to this well seven years after the previous film and poison it with this utter dreck of a sequel? It fails on almost every level as a very obvious belated cash-in. The answer is he needed the money. Craven hadn't worked for almost three years since Swamp Thing: developing scripts like the long-gestating A Nightmare on Elm Street didn't pay well on their own. His producer from The Hills Have Eyes Peter Locke convinced him there was mileage in revisiting that premise. However, the brief twenty-four day shoot on a million dollar budget, though three times the first one's cost, would still scupper any bid for quality. There was also, according to the director, a disastrous and possibly underhand post-production decision made...

Ruby, a remarkably rehabilitated survivor from Part 1's murderous cannibal family, drives to the desert with a tiresome group of kill fodder twenty-somethings as a moto-cross team who have high hopes for race victory with their own super fuel. They fall foul of Pluto (a returning Michael Berryman) plus the Reaper (John Bloom), the seven feet four-inch towering older brother of the original film's Papa Jupiter, and manage to dispatch both before the end credits, by which time you've long since stopped caring.
Along the way, there is sadly zero fun to be had enduring the awful decisions made by Craven as both director and writer. He lets in the clunkiest of exposition, such as when Ruby asks Cass "You're not feeling psychic today are you, like you sometimes do?"
The most laughable and annoying device is the repeated use of flashbacks, presumably to pad out the screen time to ninety minutes. Robert Houston, the least convincing of the original cast, kicks this off  in the opening scene as a patient unpacking his past trauma to a therapist. Mercifully we only see him this once, though the flashbacks recur through the film. In fact Craven is so desperate to get the most out of this that we even see one relived by Beast, the kick-ass German Shepherd, remembering his attack on the homicidal family in the earlier film!
Any goodwill banked by the first movie is quickly used up: the earlier frissons of docu-realism are replaced by disbelief at the poor man's Mad Max posturings of Bloom, not to mention a definite papier-mache boulder falling on one of the luckless youngsters.
The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 is such a dreadful sequel that if you didn't know Craven was behind it, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the typical case of a studio merely buying the rights and bringing in a quickie hack director to trade on the property's name without its creator's involvement. To be fair to Craven, in a later interview with Kim Newman he protested that this version was never meant to be shown. The producers had an answer print struck, (a standard procedure allowing the team to see what was lacking and decide how to apportion Craven an extra five to six days additional shooting) but afterwards "Suddenly they were acting as if that was the finished film". The studio released this rough cut it as it was, barring Craven from correcting what he knew was a poor ending, two main sequences needing revision "and the whole opening needed to be shortened drastically".
The sequel languished on the shelf for so long that only the stellar success of A Nightmare on Elm Street at the end of 1984 caused it be released as a cynical piece of opportunism in the summer of 1985.
Following his frustration, Craven kept the bills paid with Invitation To Hell, a TV movie starring Robert Urich, a crazy, slightly Faustian tale of an engineer who builds a heat resistant space suit and is forced to wear it to rescue his family from a nightclub that is a front for the entrance to Hell itself.
Thankfully, by the end of 1984, Craven would finally extricate himself from sub-standard  disttractions to re-launch his reputation as a quality craftsman of horror by introducing audiences to a gentleman named Freddy Kreuger...