You Can

Lucas wrote:
The HILLZ. Though, I bet you will actually enjoy it. I know you like Paris Hilton.

The Hillz- Dir. Saran Barnun 2004

Wow. WOW! This movie is really bad.

The Plot: A group of high school chums do drugs, swear, and kill a guy. Steve 5 (yes, that’s his real name…it’s a long story-don’t ask), one of the crew who’s a good baseball player, goes to college for a year, and when he comes back for the summer finds that his friends have gotten even more into doing drugs, swearing, and killing people. He’s got a crush on a girl named Heather (played by Paris Hilton) that’s as weird as anything I’ve ever seen on film. The drug game becomes very real for everyone involved, culminating in more swearing, drug use, and, of course, murder in the first.

What makes it watch-able: I will give “The Hillz” a single compliment: getting a low-budget film distributed (or even made) is no simple task, and the makers of this movie got the job done. That being said…

When you watch “The Hillz”, there are things about the acting and directing of the movie that are hard to ignore. I’m not going to go into these too much. There were certainly scenes that were textbook examples of what not to do, but, for a low budget film, it wasn’t that bad, technically. I am personally a pretty forgiving guy when it comes to seeing a boom in the shot or when actors look like they’re reading their lines from a script that’s just off camera. That’s just the nature of the low-budget beast.

The thing that killed this movie was the terrible plot. I don’t know when the last time was that I watched something with so many unlikable characters, or with a story that did so little in an hour and a half. There’s never anybody to root for; everyone in the film is a big jerk.

Nothing ever really happens. You can kinda tell what they’re going for–you can tell that there’s supposed to be a love story and a coming of age sort of thing and a youth out of control bit–the problem is that, despite all of the killing and swearing and drug use, nothing really happens to anybody. Either the characters die, or they remain the exact same idiots they were at the beginning of the movie. If someone was stuck-up in the first 5 minutes of the movie, they remain that way until the end. If they were into guns and acting the fool at the beginning, either they die that way or they go through the whole movie with the same attitude, right up till the end. It’s like no matter what takes place in these people’s lives, they are incapable of getting any better, worse, happier, sadder, etc.

The residual effect of this movie was devastating. After the film was finished, I went through about half an hour of thinking that life was desolate and grim and that no matter what I did, everything in my future would end up being like the worst parts of my past. I started cursing under my breath, longing for unattainable (though vacant and somehow unappealing) women, and wondering when I was going to get shot, or when I’d have to shoot somebody.

Thankfully one of my cats knocked something over and, after yelling obscenities in its direction at the top of my lungs and threatening to “cap it”, I realized that it wasn’t my world that doesn’t go anywhere, but the one I’d just sat through for an hour and a half. A big “thank you” goes out to my orange buddy Sprocket for keeping it real!

Times I had to avert my eyes: 0
Breaks necessary to complete viewing: 0
Overall rating from 1 to 10: 3.5 This was a difficult one, as it DID manage to make a lasting impression. I won’t try to watch it again, but I doubt I’ll ever forget it.