Hills and Hollers tells the story of an expecting couple living in the Midwestern Rust Belt who are attacked and stalked in the woods by a group of masked men determined to kill them.
The film opens with several picturesque shots of woodlands in the Fall and presents a nice country setting followed by some humorous conversation between two city folk, fish out of water characters driving on a country road. When the two stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and are creeped out by the attendant, one character assures the other that "not everyone is a serial killer." These prove to be famous last words as the two are killed and the story for Hills and Hollers is set up.
It's a bit unfortunate that this fun opening sequence was followed by an introduction to the main characters that is less than compelling and spends a bit too much time showing them playing cards while visiting their mother/mother-in-law. It's a good set up to introduce who these people are, but the problem lies in the lack of interesting dialogue as they spend the time discussing how to play Go Fish. There's humor to be found in the fact that they make it so difficult to explain how to play a simple game, but the presentation is not executed in an impactful way as the scene plays a bit dull and doesn't offer the viewer much to take away from it.
The following scene in the truck after the two characters leave is a better introduction to who these people are as we hear some natural sounding dialogue that fills us in about their life and situation. The two actors have a good chemistry together as the married couple and that helps us sympathize with them when things go wrong.
Things get a bit interesting when one of the killers captures the main character after they stop to visit the grave site of their father/father-in-law. There's a nice dream like montage that brings together things that happened moments before in the truck and shots of the killer sharpening an ax. The montage just seems to go on for a bit too long.
This seems to be a running issue the film suffers from. The camera lingers on trees too long, the dream like montage takes too long, a character explaining a story takes too long, the card game scene takes too long. At 56 minutes the film is short, but it should move faster instead of having it feel as though the already short run time is being inflated.
The simplistic story that was created suits the film well and the filmmakers made good use of the natural environment and by the end it felt like a horror infused game of hide and seek as the characters try to escape the killers and are chased through the woods. Hills and Hollers is a real throwback to those killer on the loose slashers from the 1980s and hillbillies in the country films of the 70's. The killers have a Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets My Bloody Valentine appearance at times and that was a pretty cool combination to see. I also dug that the one killer had a little blowtorch and the rest had some nasty looking tools that made me uncomfortable just to look at.
Hills and Hollers is a solid no budget effort from Ben Arvin that only suffers from some editing issues that takes the viewer out of the film at times. It's got some interesting killers with rusty tools as weapons, some clever scene transitions, and some nice cinematography that conflicts with the horror playing out on screen. I'd be interested to see what Ben Arvin does next and if he can tighten up his next film a bit, because Hills and Hollers shows promise.
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