Before the title even appears in the opening credits, The Hills Run Red lets you know exactly what it’s aiming for, as a young man calmly cuts the skin off his face with scissors. The film is about a film, a 1982 slasher by director Wilson Wyler Concannon (William Sadler), who never was heard from again, and whose movie — also called The Hills Run Red — never saw release. No prints exist; all that remains is a trailer and some still photos.
Obsessive and pretentious film-geek blogger (is that all redundant?) Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrinck, in a terribly amateur performance) eschews his girlfriend’s offer of sex — fiction! — and goes in search of the missing movie for a documentary project. His first stop is Concannon’s daughter, a smack-addict stripper named Alexa (Sophie Monk and her boobs). With his bland girlfriend (Janet Montgomery) and über-annoying best pal (Alex Wyndham) in tow, Tyler takes Alexa into the woods where the film was shot.
If you think they’ll discover the film’s villain of the doll-masked Babyface there, you’ve seen more than one horror movie! These Hills aren’t exactly original — in fact, they’re downright predictable — but that has to be all part of the plan, paying homage to down-and-dirty conventions of the slasher genre in its heyday, while bringing it into the present with an unrated amount of gore, much of it made possible by the creative use of barbed wire.
Director Dave Parker delivers a sick, slick package, which is a miracle considering he wrote House of the Dead, one of the worst movies I’ve ever had the displeasure of paying to see in a theater. From his prose work, David J. Schow seems like a smarter screenwriter than to craft dialogue like “Fuck me sideways!” and “C’mon, fucker!,” but he’ll give you what you want in the senseless-slaughter and demented-daddy departments. The Hills Run Red — that, they do. —Rod Lott