Writer/director Dave Parker finally returns to the genre after his 2000 debut with the low-budget zombedy The Dead Hate the Living, and after a couple writing gigs and various documentary efforts, he brings us the gutsy straight-to-DVD slasher The Hills Run Red. Not a bad return, in my opinion. Hills has received a lot of positive feedback from numerous critics since its rounds at festivals and has garnered a decent amount of hype. I try not to pay much attention to hype behind a flick, as it usually leaves you disappointed when you discover that the movie isn't as good as many have made it out to be. Luckily for Hills, it did turn out to be a fairly good and enjoyable slasher.

The story follows a film buff/horror fanatic, whose obsession towards an obscure slasher film leads him to track down the director's daughter in hopes of finding out why the movie seems to have disappeared from existence and if a complete print of it still exists. Accompanied by his unfaithful girlfriend/boom mic operator and his best friend/camera man, they set out to the town where the flick was shot and more specifically the wooded area, where many of the kills took place. However, the group will soon discover that the film was never fully completed and it's still on-going, now with them as the new leads...

The killer in this flick is called "Babyface" due to the fact that he wears a babyface mask over his own disfigured face, which he willingly cut up with a pair of scissors as a kid! The killer, much like the movie, doesn't play into a lot of the standard slasher formulas, in fact, the best friend character points out a lot of clichés we often see in the genre in a few scenes of this movie. Cell phones? Work! Got a gun? Yup! Splitting up!? I don't think so! Hell, Babyface even busts out a handgun at one point and shoots some fool.

As far as gore goes, there's a decent amount here and there, but nothing really worth mentioning. The practical effects were pretty standard, but there were a couple cheesy CGI shots that it could've been done without. There's nothing really that stands out with me in terms of deaths, but there were a couple nice torture scenes. Expect a lot of boobage early on, while we're getting to know our leads, especially when we first meet Sophie Monk's character as the director's daughter, who has grown up to be a junkie stripper.

The movie isn't the most original, but it still attempts to throw some twists at us towards the end, which chances are us seasoned genre vets will have already seen coming. Regardless, there was a good amount of blood and I really liked the killer and how the film attempted to change some of the clichés we're witness to far too often within the genre. Give this a check.