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A cinephile goes in search of a missing, long forgotten horror film, only to find that the killer is alive and well in the woods where the film was made, waiting for a new set of victims.

Playing with the same ideas as films like Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns and the more recent Midnight Movie, Dave Parker’s The Hills Run Red posits the idea that filmmaker Wilson Wyler Concannon (William Sadler) made a notorious slasher film of the same name in the early 80’s, which was only shown a few times before all prints, people involved and even director Concannon himself disappeared.  Enter Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink), an obsessed horror fan who thinks that an investigation into this rare film could be parlayed into a film of his own, a documentary about the film and his search for it.  Along for the ride are his less than thrilled girlfriend Serina (Janet Montgomery), who is rapidly tiring of his obsession ruining their lovelife (he blows her off to re-watch the trailer for the missing film, presumably for the 1000th time?), along with his best friend (and their roommate) Gabe (Mike Straub), who just so happens to be banging Tyler’s bored & ignored girlfriend.  This is why I’ve never had roommates, I don’t need that kinda competition on the way to the kitchen.

Tyler manages to track down Concannon’s daughter Alexa (Sophie Monk), who is now all grown up and stripping for a living to support her own big girl habit of a drug addiction.  Tyler has to put his film-making plans on hold for a few days to participate in a montage of him sobering her up in the cheap motel she lives in before introducing her to Gabe and Serina.  In a rather unsurprising move, Serina completely hates Alexa from the moment they meet because she assumes Tyler has been sleeping with her, evidence of her own guilty conscience creeping in.

Alexa’s own memories of the film shoot are sketchy at best, given her age when the film was shot and the subsequent years of drugs, so they head into the remote wooded area where she sort of remembers her father’s cabin retreat being, stopping along the way for interviews with the local color to use as filler.  Alexa has flashes of the film shoot, even thinks she sees the film’s killer Babyface (Raicho Vasilev) lurking nearby, and unbeknownst to the filmmakers, someone else is filming them.  The locals reveal that the film being shown at the drive-in ended in murder and chaos, and our intrepid band of film scholars heads deeper into the woods in search of Concannon’s cabin.  They locate a specific set of trees that appeared in the trailer for the film, leading them to believe that they are on the right track, and Tyler shoots Alexa at the location for use as filler.

They settle in for the night, making camp and Tyler spends time reviewing his footage, which appears to picture Babyface lurking in the background of one shot, which is obviously alarming.  As if on cue, noises from the surrounding woods draws his attentions, but who should he be more scared of, the presumably fictional killer or the locals who know that they’re out in the woods alone?

The film has some nice twists and some rather disturbing ideas at work, all of which become clear as we enter the final act.  I enjoyed this quite a bit, my only quibble might be the detour the film takes as Tyler puts Alexa through a crash course in detox, which might’ve worked better in the context of a novella rather than a film, but oh well, it’s a pointless thing to nitpick when the rest of the film moves along so well.

The DVD release of The Hills Run Red arrives courtesy of Warner Home Video and features a commentary track with director Dave Parker, teleplay writer David J. Schow, and producer Robert Meyer Burnett, along with a featurette called It’s Not Real Until You Shoot It: The Making of The Hills Run Red which gives a nice behind the scenes look at the film.

I really dug this one, I think it’d be a great rental, or even a purchase if you’re a big fan of the slasher genre, it’s an interesting take on the concept and the character design on Babyface is rather creepy from the still photo on the DVD case alone.

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