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THE HILLS RUN RED

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thehillsrunreddvd3 Stars  2009/18/81m

Director: Dave Parker / Writers: John Dombrow, John Carchietta & David J. Schow / Cast: Sophie Monk, Tad Hilgenbrinck, Janet Montgomery, Alex Wyndham, William Sadler, Raicho Vasilev.

Body Count: at least 19

Dire-logue: “The characters always head out to the middle of nowhere, right? Suddenly their cars, their cell phones, their technology can’t save them and nobody ever brings a fucking gun!”

Mucho hype surrounded this film before it was unveiled at various horror festivals, it’s ‘back to basics,’ ‘gives horror fans what they want,’ blah blah best thing since sliced cheerleaders la la la…

It’s a slasher film about a 1982 slasher film, The Hills Run Red, which was withdrawn soon after its release and never seen again, along with the director and most of the cast. Horror geek Tyler is obsessed with finding the original reels and making a documentary about it, so after tracking down bit-parter and director’s daughter Alexa, now a heroin junkie lapdancer, he and his girlfriend Serina and best bud Lalo (who are secretly screwing), drive off in search of the house where the film was originally shot.

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No sooner than setting up camp, the killer from the film – Babyface – appears and saves the kids from a trio of rednecks who happened by to torment them and kidnaps Alexa, prompting the others to give chase to try and save her. Here, things twist off in to a place that sees the wings splinter off this flight, which sends it into a long nosedive from an altitude of intense slasherama to indulgent torture-porn-lite with a disatisfying conclusion. This also means that character expectations are switched and those we thought would most certainly survive or die…might not.

Until the twist is made evident, The Hills Run Red flirts with four-star truimphance: it’s slick, well-paced, bloody without being stupidly gory and engaging, a straight-up stalk n’ slasher from the days of yore, precisely what the mission statement appeared to be. It becomes another Texas Chainsaw wannabe with an overabundance of psychos, sleaze, unimpressive motives and a downbeat twist ending. And so it ends up in three-star land, a respectable showing for any B-movie of the stomp-and-kill ilk, perhaps a bit of a disappointment for genre aficionados who were hoping for the mooted next great horror icon…who looks a bit like the loon from Dark Ride to me.

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Blurbs-of-interest: bizarrely, the last new slasher flick I watched, Wrong Turn 3, not only starred Janet Montgomery, but was also shot in the same locale of Bulgaria and featured a horde of British actors doing American accents. Alex Wyndham was also in Red Mist.

WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

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wrongturn3WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

1.5 Stars  2009/92m

“What you don’t see will kill you.”

Director: Declan O’Brien / Writer: Connor James Delaney / Cast: Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, Tamer Hassan, Gil Kolirin, Tom McKay, Christian Contreras, Jake Curran, Chucky Venice, Bill Moody, Borislav Iliev.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “He’s out there… I can feel him. He’s been following us. He’s close.”

How to take one of the best survivalist slasher films in the last few years and drive into an almost aggressively bad DVD series in three easy films…

I watched half of Wrong Turn 3 yesterday and the rest today. In between, I took my dog out for a walk in a close by field. There was a creepy dense fog and, save for my dog’s flashing collar darting about in the mist, all I had to light my way was a blue-strobe LED ghost that squeaks ‘woooo’ when you press it. With mutant inbred cannibals on my mind, every blob in the dark could’ve been a psycho with an axe… Every sloppy thing I stepped in could’ve been gory entrails – but turned out to be cow shit.

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Having just finished the film, there was nothing to fear. The South Downs ain’t West Virginia. In fact West Virginia ain’t West Virginia here either as for WT3 they outsourced the project to Bulgaria and used an almost exclusively British cast!

Things start okay with a quartet of “all-American teens” kayaking down a river. They stop to set up camp and one couple goes to fetch wood while the others get jiggy. Boobs appear within minutes and seconds later there’s an arrow sticking out of the boob and through boob-girl’s boyfriend’s hand. Three of the teens are offed within the first seven minutes, all quite gorily: one guy gets skewered through the gob and the other trips a trap that pays tribute to the hacked-in-half opener from Wrong Turn 2, this time splitting the guy into three pieces. It’s impressive for all of five seconds until the world’s worst CGI kicks in…

wrongturn3splitAfter the remaining girl, Alex, escapes, we move to a prison where officer Nate’s last day on the job (yawn…) is made worse with the news that he has to chaperone several prisoners on a transfer to another facility to thwart a rumoured escape attempt by Mexican gangster Chavez. We know he’s Mexican because he calls everyone ‘Puta,’ which, I learnt, is the equivalent of whore. The route between venues is altered to allow the solo-working inbred to run the bus off the road, let the prisoners gain control and send the group running into the woods, where Alex soon leaps out, all screams and immediate expositions…

The group discover an old armoured truck full of cash and continue yelling at one another and swearing amidst aimlessly wandering into all of the hick’s savage traps, including a sliced off face, a vertical spear impaling and a skull cracked open and its lid removed like a boiled egg… We’re only supposed to care about Alex, Nate and the one trustworthy con who swears he didn’t commit the murder he’s inside for. But I didn’t really. They were such cookie-cutter good guys that they were boring, with none of the situational flair that Eliza Dushku and Desmond Harrington had in the original film.

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Also absent is a sense of futility: in the first film there was a real sense of doom for the teens-in-peril, that they wouldn’t get out of this. Plus they were nice kids out for a good time. The second film at least had the sense to try and make its leads affable enough to root for but all the characters in Wrong Turn 3 blur into a gross soup of I-don’t-care proportions. The only character I cared about the was the police dog and that didn’t end well.

Three-Finger, now working alone after his son (assumedly the grown up baby from the end of Dead End) is done away with by the felons, is played by a Bulgarian stuntman who looks like he’s wearing a third-rate plastic Halloween mask and also has the Hiro Nakamurian ability to teleport after he is ‘killed’ by Nate and Alex, who take his truck and drive for several minutes, finding him further down the road than they’ve managed to get!

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But perhaps the worst thing is like a blast from the past. But the past that came before the 80s, the 70s, before Jesus! Remember in old studio films when there was a character in a car, they drove in front of a screen and lackies rocked the vehicle from either side, that’s what they do in Wrong Turn 3 – the bus, the truck, check that fucking background! How low was the budget?

Sucky story, sucky characters, sucky prosthetics, vile CGI, crap actors, a grand total of three female characters… The sweet memory of seeing Wrong Turn back in ’03 feels like it has been raped by a backwoods inbred.

Blurbs-of-interest: Tom Frederic was the doomed boyfriend in the even worse Blood Trails. Janet Montgomery was also in The Hills Run Red – also shot in 2009, also shot in Bulgaria, also lots of trees. Declan O’Brien returned to direct Wrong Turn 4 in 2011.

CREEP

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creep3 Stars  2004/18/85m

“Your journey terminates here.”

Director / Writer: Christopher Smith / Cast: Franka Potente, Vas Blackwood, Jeremy Sheffield, Paul Rattray, Kelly Scott, Sean Harris.

Body Count: 10

Ahh…London Underground. Cancelled trains, bizarre aromas (I once saw a guy attempting to piss through the window into the gap between carriages), tube mice, people cramming themselves in like sardines and sub-human psycho killers. On reflection, I think I’d rather deal with the latter.

Chris Smith’s gritty creature-feature-cum-slasher kicks off with a relatively nightmarish concept: London it-girl Kate (Potente) rushes from a late night party to see if she can track down George Clooney, who is rumoured to be somewhere close by. A moment’s resting of her eyes and Kate wakes up on a deserted platform having missed the last train of the night. Worse still, she’s now locked in the station.

When an empty train does turn up, Kate hops on and is almost immediately plunged into darkness and then attacked by a sleazy acquaintance of hers, Guy (the excellent Sheffield). She is temporarily rescued by the intervention of an unseen figure who drags Guy away and (unbeknownst to her) has also murdered the train driver.

From this point, the film turns into a series of thwarted escape attempts. Kate purchases the assistance of a homeless couple who live in a ‘rabbit warren’ of tunnels and she finally joins forces with captive sanitation worker George (Blackwood). The two pool their resources and strike back against the killer, a dim-dwelling troglodyte with the super-scary name of…Craig, who is the implied product of some dodgy secret science experiment that was taking place under the station.

The inferences surrounding the killer’s origins dampen the grisly ambience and subtract much of his initial menace but Smith liberally dishes out the grue when required and really puts Kate through the grinder, having her crawl around within inches of rats and swimming through sewage, ending with a chucklesome note when she finally makes it back to safety.

Creep maybe indebted to the likes of Deathline with echoes of Mimic, but comes into its own in terms of its unpleasant nature and classic Brit-grit. Unfortunately, the premise does not afford an 85 minute film, so much as a segment in an anthology. The mission statement was to do the same for the tube as Psycho did for showers and, thanks to keying in on some of those trapped in an endless maze nightmare motifs, said mission is at the very least part accomplished.

Blurbs-of-interest: Smith later directed Severence; Potente had already starred in the German medical-slasher Anatomy; Sheffield later appeared in The Children.

RED MIST

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redmistRED MIST

2.5 Stars  2008/18/82m

“Do not resuscitate.”

A.k.a. Freakdog

Director: Paddy Breathnach / Writer: Spence Wright / Cast: Arielle Kebbel, Sarah Carter, Andrew Lee Potts, Stephen Dillane, Alex Wyndham, Martin Compston, Katie McGrath, Christina Chong, Michael Jibson, MyAnna Buring.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “So, Kenneth is somehow taking over people’s bodies and killing us one at a time – have I got that right?”

When I picked Red Mist off the shelf and saw that it was “from the director of Shrooms” I almost involuntarily squawked “yuck!” and slammed it back from whence it came. However, due to this stupid penchant for slasher completism I have, I Lovefilmed it and it turned up just t’other day. The good news is that it’s way better than the tripe-fest that was Shrooms, although the director still has a thing for passing off British/Irish productions as American (accents n’ all…) but that’s alright, I can see why he’d do it. In fact, despite similarities to old 80’s horrors Out of the Body and Aenigma, Red Mist is pretty damn promising, it just kinda gets a few things wrong… Read on…

A group of uniformally popular and good looking interns at a hospital upset weirdo self-harmer Kenneth (also good looking considering his status), who confesses he has video footage of one of them pocketing drugs from the pharmacy for recreational purposes and their resolve is to ply him with booze and drugs, unknowingly inducing an epileptic fit that descends the lad into a coma, which they cover up by dumping the body outside ER and driving away. All but nice girl Catherine (Kebbel) exhale with relief when told of his condition and that, due to expired insurance and no relatives, his life support will be turned off soon. Guilt-ridden Catherine does some research and discovers an untested phase one drug that may help and doses Kenneth on it.

redmist1This is where things become ambitious but also a bit shit. Wonderdrug allows Kenneth to possess individuals and use them as his weaponry to kill the med students responsible: one girl gets her head slammed in a car door by the security guard while a sexy nurse force feeds nasty ringleader Sean with acid. Some of the other kills occur off screen while Catherine runs about trying to convince people of what’s going on until she herself is possessed and later wakes up in the woods unaware of what she might or might not have done…

Some sub-lot blurb about a selfish doctor trying to steal Catherine’s glory provides a little resistance come the end but by this time Red Mist has slid too far down its self inflicted slope and the contrived “it’s not done” ending, similar to that in Breathnach’s earlier film, is a groaner. It’d work better as a straight-up revenge slasher and only feels rushed in its present state, with many characters quickly dispensed with rather than given their due comeuppance for their early nastiness. A good try with a good cast and ideas but too little in terms of pay-off.

redmist2Blurbs-of-interest: Arielle Kebbel was in Reeker and The Grudge 2; Sarah Carter was in Final Destination 2; Katie McGrath was the lead in the TV show Slasher; MyAnna Buring was one of the potholers in The Descent.

CrappyCrappy

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killerkillerKILLERKILLER

1 Stars  2006/75m

“The public calls them murderers. The papers call them monsters. She calls them prey.”

Director/Writer: Pat Higgins / Cast: Cy Henty, Dutch Dore-Boize, Danielle Laws, Richard Collins, James Kavaz, Nick Page, Scott Denyer, Danny James, Rami Hilmi.

Body Count: 9

Bizarre no-budget indie project, which begins with the all-too familiar scenario of a babysitter being stalked around a London townhouse. Into the kitchen… up the stairs… into the bathroom as she disrobes for a shower, turns around to find a masked killer poised with a knife and…

…whips out twin blades and does him in! This witty intro aside, Killerkiller plays out like a stage-adaptation once we meet eight incarcerated murderers who wake up to find their prison-slash-institute has no guards, no locks, and somebody who is offing them one by one. How and why they are there – don’t bother asking.

Mucho testosterone-fuelled dialogue later, we discover that blondie babysitter is some sort of demon who is zapping them temporarily into relative nightmares (all about their past crimes) and passing ultimate judgment over them. It might’ve worked if the expenditure was in double figures – but it ain’t so it ends up as one of the longer 75 minute stints to experience.

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