3/23/07: The Zero Boys (1986)We loved
the recent remake, but
The Hills Have Eyes 2 is really lousy. It’s not even a remake of the original sequel. That means you don’t get to see the dog have a flashback. What you get is Wes Craven (and son) creating a lame political allegory that depicts our National Guard as untrained incompetents who can't even kill a bunch of inbred mutants.
So let’s salute a film that gets a similar scenario right. The titular heroes of
The Zero Boys aren’t National Guardsmen. They’re three guys who are really good at paintball. They’re not shy about their military fantasies, either. “Eat your heart out, Sly,” says one during the opening sequence. Film students will recognize this as a reference to the popular
Rambo films of the 1980s. Those were pretty liberal compared to
The Zero Boys.
That opening has the Zero Boys taking out another paintball team that has a leader who likes to dress like Hitler. The trio celebrates by heading out for a long weekend of training, accompanied by two girlfriends and a gal named Jamie—who used to date Hitler. She’s kind of uptight, especially when she learns that the Boys don’t practice with paintball guns.
Instead, they’ve got an arsenal of modified semi-automatic firearms. Jamie calls them a bunch of Nazis. The Zero Boys take offense at that. Anyway, the group soon finds themselves stranded at a creepy old house in the woods that turns out to be the home of a bunch of psycho killers who like to make snuff films.
That’s bad news for the psycho killers. See, they’re the kind of maniacs who like to walk around while brandishing knives and machetes. It’s a tribute to director Nico Mastorakis that
The Zero Boys has any kind of tension. There are several creepy sequences as the potential victims discover that they’re in a bad situation. Once that’s resolved, though, the Zero Boys are locked and loaded. This is almost a Leftist horror film, in that you feel sorry for the homicidal maniacs who’ve brought their machetes to a gunfight.
Even a chilling final shot—setting up the sequel that never happened—doesn’t really work. You just can’t worry about our heroes. They’ve already survived with the lowest body count in the history of the horror genre. Also, they got to kill Martin Sheen’s brother. You know why that sequel never happened? It would’ve been three minutes long.
Make it your own: You can choose from the cheaper of
two different DVD editions, and the used
VHS copies are even less expensive. It still seems weird to not be watching
The Zero Boys on late-night cable.
And one more warning on
The Hills Have Eyes 2: The last time that Wes Craven got together with his son was for 1995’s
Mind Ripper. If you’re enough of a horror geek to have seen
Mind Ripper, then you’ll know that’s the one credit that’ll keep even the horror geeks away from
The Hills Have Eyes 2—and the worst part is that
Mind Ripper was originally written as
The Hills Have Eyes 3, so this is like a remake of the non-existent sequel that was still crap.
