Warner Brothers
R4 DVD
The
Hills Run Red is an impressive new take
on the slasher genre; using torture, gore, misdirection and lots of suspense to
offer a merciless journey into the heart of horror cinema. The plot centres
around a rare horror film called “The Hills Run Red”; it is a film which has literally
disappeared only leaving a badly aged trailer, some photos and a poster. Years
later, Tyler, a young film collector decides to make a documentary on the missing
film and tries to locate any surviving actors and maybe even a print. Through
these early scenes we are treated to snapshots of the original film and images
of its central character, the deformed Baby Face. Babyface is just a character
from the movie, right? Wrong. He’s alive and he’s waiting for you.
Tyler
locates the filmmaker’s daughter and after helping her escape from a bikers
stripers club he spends two days detoxing her from heroin addiction. In
appreciation she decides to lead Tyler and his friends to the location where
the film was short and her father’s final resting place in the woods. She seems
so sincere and honest, but are her motives what they seem ?
While
the film, at first glance, could be put in the same class as the “Scream” series, it is not a horror
comedy. The self referencing humour is actually used to increase the suspense not
as a source of quick laughs. For example, when they make fun of the fact that
in slasher films most people go into the forest without a mobile phone or a
gun, you are reassured that they know what they are doing and hence when things
go horribly wrong you are even more confronted.
This
regular use of misdirection is very effective. A prime example is that as they
travel out of the city they joke that in such films city folk are regularly
attacked and raped by rednecks. When they spent their first night in the bush
the rednecks attack as expected, however Baby Face soon appears and slaughters the
rednecks and himself becomes their major adversary. By playing with the
expectations of the viewer The Hills Run
Red sustains the tension right to the very end of the film.
The
climax of the film is truly twisted as we find the line between reality and
cinema blurring and come to appreciate the true “horror” of the original film. The
truth about the filmmaker and his daughter is a real shock and a nice surprise.
The fact that it mixes together urban legends of Snuff films, obsessive love of
cinema and true madness makes it a very different plot from the current run-of-the-hill
slasher film.
The
violence and gore is certainly high and be prepared for lots of bloodshed,
torture and the mandatory nudity and sex. There's a body ripped in half, a
skull sawed in half, multiple impalements, a stabbing, a gunshot wound and lots
more. The killings are presented in a nicely stylized manner, many reminiscent
of Italian horror and Giallo cinema and certainly confront and astound.
The
way in which scenes from the original “lost” film and flashbacks from the filmmaker’s
daughter are interwoven with attacks by Baby Face blurs the line between
reality and fantasy and adds to the nightmarish mood of the film.
I
enjoyed every moment of The Hills Run Red
and felt that it was a highly innovative, unusual and gore ridden addition to
the slasher genre.
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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.6 (2009) of the digital and
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