The Hills Run Red (2009/Warner Premier DVD)

 

Picture: B-     Sound: C+     Extras: B     Feature: C

 

 

The Hills Run Red falls into two of the major overused categories within the horror genre.  The first is the inbred cannibal hick trope, which was vaulted to prominence after the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the second is the “horror movie about a horror movie” theme.  The inbred hick plotline has come to be expected by now.  It’s almost become its own subgenre alongside the holiday slasher (My Bloody Valentine, Black Christmas, etc.) or the monster flick.

 

The recurring preoccupation with making horror movies about horror movies is getting stale though.  There have been a few outstanding examples (Scream, Peeping Tom) but mostly it just seems tacky.  The notion is to create a self-reflexive film that invites a deeper reading of the text.  But as The Hills Run Red will attest, more often than not these films fall short of making any insightful observations about cinema and instead come off as masturbatory.

 

In The Hills Run Red, Tyler is obsessed with a horror film (called The Hills Run Red) that was supposedly so violent and scary that it was pulled from theaters twenty years ago, and all copies vanished along with its director, Concannon.  When Tyler tracks Concannon’s daughter down, she takes him, his girlfriend Serina, and his bro-mantic buddy Lalo out into the woods where her father shot his film.  When they get there though, they find the film’s killer, Babyface, still lurking.  And it only gets worse from there.

 

To the filmmaker’s credit, The Hills Run Red features some pretty fantastic gore, but it offers little else in the way of filmmaking.  For a film that’s so preoccupied with the process of making a horror film, it either entirely misses or consciously ignores the rhythm and setup that makes a scary movie scary.

 

The picture and sound quality are actually surprisingly good.  Presented in a letterboxed 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio and Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio, it’s only a shame that the disc’s technical audio was validated by better sound design on the filmmaker’s part.

 

The special features on the disc consist of a commentary track and “It’s Not Real Until You Shoot It: Making The Hills Run Red”.  The latter draws its title from one of the repeated lines in the film and is one of the better making-of featurettes I’ve ever seen.  It’s the sort of special feature that makes you like the feature just a little bit more by association.

 

The Hills Run Red is a worthwhile film for horror buffs, and has been touted within the horror community as such.  Poor storytelling and gaping plot holes have come to be expected in many slasher films, and this we can forgive.  What’s harder to forgive is the fact that The Hills Run Red clearly thinks that it’s better cinema and more insightful than it really is.

 

 

-   Matthew Carrick