The Hills Run Red (2009)

We've all heard the story of the lost film; that old horror classic that mysteriously and tragically falls through the cracks never to be seen again. A handful of them, such as the often bereaved London After Midnight, go on to attain a legendary status that was likely only made possible by their very absence. But what if, what if, some old forgotten film did carry the whisper of something dark, something real, something fat, deadly, and wanting its mother. Some mysteries are best left sleeping.

Horror geek Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink) has deaf ears for any such advice. The Hills Run Red is a lost film; a notorious slasher that disappeared without a trace after a very small screening many years ago. Hungry to gain some notoriety by finding the missing treasure, he tracks down the promiscuous and drugged out stripper daughter (Sophie Monk) of the film's director (William Sadler), sobers the girl up, and heads out into the hilled forest to find where the lost film was made, dragging two of his good friends Lalo (Alex Wyndham) and Serina (Janet Montgomery) along with him for the ride.

As tends to happen in these sorts of situations, they find a lot more than they were expecting. The general synopsis of The Hills Run Red turns out to be very real, and quite willing to accept a few more victims into its fold. The villains of The Hills Run Red have a grand scheme - and it's a wild and crazy plan.

Here's the spoiler lowdown. A diaper-wearing rapping spider tragically dies and is reincarnated as a diaper-wearing rapping cow. This cow has plans. It's going to put messages in catchy rap tunes to get his fans to donate food, any and all food, and pile it up into a giant rotting mound. Then he plans to let it sit and wait for the flies to come. The flies will barf all over the food, as flies are wont to do, and then the cow will collect all the fly barf and use its powerful corrosive properties to burn through the walls of the local bank safe and so escape with pounds and pounds of cash, all swinging merrily from its happy udders.

That's not true. That's from a different story. I guess I haven't spoiled anything. What is true is the diabolical plan of the baddies of The Hills Run Red is only mildly less ludicrous than that of Aqua Teen Hunger Forces' Sir Loin. It's a plan that's as difficult to swallow as a golf ball that's attached to a bowling ball that's attached to Mickey Rourke. A bonus similarity is that frontman villain Babyface may also have an appreciation for diapers though he, thank god, does not rap.

Babyface (Danko Jordanov) is certainly worth remarking upon. I tend to like him. He's big, ridiculous, and more than a bit absurd, but the mask and skeletal jaw, at least for me, works. The beast feels much more like a parody of an iconic slasher, and taken in that light it's silly, gruesome, and a little fun. The giant brutal infant doesn't speak more than one line; but that single utterance manages to be one of the more startling and entertaining portions of the entire film. It made me blink and rewind. I wish that had been fleshed out further, and the dark humor that it carried with it allowed to fully bloom.

While it may be best to digest the killer Babyface as a parody, it may be difficult to do so when the vehicle he rides in is so serious. The Hills Run Red takes itself far more seriously than it should; especially considering its primary villain is a big fat guy in a baby mask with a "death rattle". Like Hatchet, it has numerous homages, intentional cliches (and twists of), and an obvious love for the genre; but it only has a fraction of the humor. This is especially true of the ending, which seemed to shoot for something meaningful but totally lost me. A lighter touch and a heavier dose of dark humor would have taken this a long way forward.

The cursed film within a film thing has done before, most notably in John Carpenter's Masters of Horror entry Cigarette Burns, and one line in The Hills Run Red arguably pays brief homage to this relation. Both films suffer from the same weakness; the big reveal of the inner film is lacking. Cigarette Burns was great, at least until the cursed film was shown; at which point it became artsy nonsense. Carpenter should have never shown the actual inner film, and left it to the viewer's imagination. Show reaction shots instead, perhaps filming the actor's faces as they watch Two Girls and a Cup for the first time. The horror!

Similarly, the cursed inner film of The Hills Run Red wasn't very impressive. It's a standard slasher, of which there are many hundreds like it, featuring some big guy wearing a mask chasing down screaming victims. We've seen this before, and we're left wondering what Tyler's hubbub was all about. Why would anyone want to chase down a "lost" film that ends up looking like any other slasher you find on Netflix's streaming video? Like Cigarette Burns, I think this might have had more impact if the inner film wasn't truly revealed. Some of the success of Steven Spielberg's Jaws is attributable to the fact the shark broke and so they couldn't use it. Sometimes it's what you don't see that's most frightening of all.

It's easy to plunk holes in The Hills Run Red, but it's easy to do this with most slashers. The subgenre is mainly made up of films which shrug at logic and cohesion in favor of screams, boobs, and blood. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you know what you're getting into. As a slasher and ranked amongst its immediate peers, The Hills Run Red isn't bad. Fans of slashers will likely get their money's worth; those looking for fresher fare may want to pass. You know which you are.