The Hills Run Red Archives

“I like horror movies that look like horror movies” – An Interview with Dave Parker

As big-screen horror becomes increasingly focused on remakes and endless sequels, I find that the most interesting horror films on the small screen. Of course there’s a lot of the entrails of horror movie waste to wade through to get to the meaty specimens, but Dave Parker is one name that I’ve been on the lookout for ever since The Dead Hate the Living, a labor of love tribute to Italian giallo with an American sensibility released straight-to-video in 2000. It was the culmination of his love of horror films and his apprenticeship at Full Moon Entertainment under Charles Band, the king of direct-to-video horror and sci-fi in the nineties.

Dave Parker and Sophie Monk — Director Dave Parker with "The Hills Run Red" star Sophie Monk

It took almost ten years for Parker’s second solo feature, but in the meantime he continued working within the business as an editor, writer and director of documentaries created as DVD supplements for genre films such as The Usual Suspects, X-Men, Spider-Man 2 and Superman Returns. It was like a second apprenticeship that paid off with The Hills Run Red, the first original title from the direct-to-DVD Warner Premiere line. Are they undiscovered horror masterpieces? Not exactly. Parker is less sure with actors than he is with a camera and even in The Hills Run Red, his unknown leads deliver rather generic performances in the face of sassy sexpot Sophie Monk and wily veteran character man William Sadler, one of the criminally unsung actors of the past couple of decades.

But Parker overcomes the weakness of the performances with an onscreen camaraderie between the characters that adds a touch of authenticity to their enterprises and an affection that makes us care. That affection extends to all levels of his direction: both films feel lovingly created, full of details that make the most of limited resources. In The Dead Hate the Living, a film about young filmmakers creating their own low budget horror, his limitations become the defining elements of their resources. The Hills Run Red makes two-for-two for Parker in films about horror movie buffs whose own moviemaking efforts get tangled with real horrors directly related to their film. Clever homages abound in both, but they’re more subtle and savvy in The Hills Run Red. Most importantly, it’s fun watching his films, and fun is exactly what’s missing from so many of the horror movies on screens big and small nowadays. [Read my review of The Hills Run Red here.]

DVD Tricks and Treats: Small Screen Halloween Picks

Instead of the usual “best of” countdown of familiar classics, here’s a look at some of the more interesting horrors that have arrived on DVD within the last year. (Reviews originally published on seanax.com)

Direct to DVD:

The Hills Run Red (Warner) is the rare self-aware horror by an unabashed fan of the genre that works on its own terms. Dave Parker’s first feature, his sadly underappreciated love-letter to Italian horror films and giallo buffs The Dead Hate the Living!, was made ten years ago. In the meantime he honed his technical skills on movie documentaries and featurettes for DVDs. As a result, The Hills Run Redâ€”which sends another horror buff on the trail of a lost movie with a camera, a small crew and the lost girl-turned-junkie stripper daughter (Sophie Monk) of the mysterious, long dead director and into a real-life continuation of the filmâ€”is leaner, tighter, more assured in its direction and less obvious in its references. His male leads are a bit thinâ€”Parker creates likable characters but not particularly vivid or memorable heroesâ€”but Sophie Monk takes a big bloody bite out of her part and William Sadler makes the mad movie director into a real gone guy, an obsessive lost in his delusions of suffering for art. Other people’s suffering, that is. “Everybody is expendable for the good of the movie,” is his mantra. “Everybody.” The signature villain, Babyface, is as visually distinctive a figure as you could hope for (it has eerie echoes of a creature escaped from a Quay Brothers nightmare) and the shake of a baby rattle as he runs after his victims is a nice touch.

You can find echoes of Psycho, Peeping Tom, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Blair Witch Project and Theodore Roszak’s cult cinephile novel Flicker in the script (which was significantly worked over by The Crow screenwriter David J. Schow) and imagery, and there’s a timely meta-textual debate on the aesthetics of modern horror cinema that is played for grisly humor between warring art-killers. While one argues for the importance of context and emotional resonance, the other makes the case for shock value and upping the ante on sadism spectacle: “Nobody cares about that subtext shit.” But the film works on its own merits. Parker knows what he wants and he gets it. He plays with the contrast of movie-movie gore (the idea that what we’re seeing is a special effect) and the “real” gore assaulting our characters by shifting our perspectives time and again, and he blurs the line between on-screen and off-screen reality, at least for these characters. Features commentary by Parker with writer David J. Schow and producer Robert Meyer Burnett and the shot-on-location featurette “It’s Not Real Until You Shoot It: The Making of The Hills Run Red,” which is a bit disorganized but captures the excitement of the creators (like Parker, they create trailers and DVD featurettes for other people in their day jobs) getting to make their own feature.