The Hillz feels like such a scatterbrained imitation. Looking at the recent rash of drug and dude movies, and hoping that by adding a little crime, and a certain skeezy socialite, he too will experience some positive press, writer/director/actor/ producer Saran Barnum has fashioned one foul-smelling fiasco. Built on a premise that all rich white kids are mass murderers at heart, and tossing in some hopelessly inappropriate comedy in an attempt to make his missteps seem obvious, this movie is a massive mess. It wants to be The Godfather for high school graduates, or The Sopranos for suburbanites. But thanks to the piss poor production values all around, and the questionable approach to its subject matter, this surreal stooge shoot 'em up is an abhorrent adolescent abomination. Luddites may actually have a point about the precarious nature of technology, especially after seeing what the low-priced available ability of filmmaking equipment has wrought.

The DVD:
Duff, Steve 5, Seb and T (apparently, all of their parents were asleep at the naming wheel when these dumbasses were born) are lifelong friends, bored out of their rich and privileged mind somewhere in La-La Land known as The Hillz. When they aren't scoring drugs and getting high, they're bitching about their lack of popularity and cursing out random people on the street. Naturally, they never see how their attitude and their pariah status are interrelated. But then again, these idiots couldn't add single digits without the help of a wet nurse. One night, Steve 5 (who is apparently a hot shot baseball prospect – that is, when he's not passing out like a comatose crack-smoking koala every five seconds) gets into a mix-up with fratboy Todd, who just so happens to be dating Steve's dream girl, Heather. A local loser named Craig shows up, draws a gun, and pants are systematically peed. Duff learns the power of the pistol and, after date raping a girl, he finds himself a gat to call his very own. Naturally, the first thing he and his pals do with it is kill a cop-in-training.

We fast forward one entire year (yep – it's THAT kind of movie) and Steve is back from college where he just won the Intercollegiate World Series. Apparently cold-blooded murder really helps your knuckleball. Duff is now a drug kingpin with T as his toady. Seb is off working in a pizza joint to support his jailbait girlfriend, and Heather is still hooked up with her Greek geek. There are a few new members of the MERGE gang as well (though we never learn what the frig that name means), lunkheads with names like Piss Boy, Toolbox and Rob Nuts. Duff mainly hangs around JJ, who's like the lover he never seems to have. These two make the concept of criminals being thick as thieves positively prissy. Anyway, everyone hates MERGE and wants them dead. Vendettas are aired out and bullets fly. Characters die and nobody cares. We even get a crooked cop, some anti-Asian ethic slurring and a great deal of gratuitous Paris Hilton. In the end, we learn crime really doesn't pay. Instead, it only fosters hackneyed finales dripping with irony as fashioned by inebriates.

Anyone looking for a single buzzword laden overview of The Hillz should probably be happy with the following possible pull-quote: The Hillz is the worst pile of cinematic cow crap ever to soil the inside of a DVD player. It is a movie that hates its audience, despises its characters and couldn't care less if it entertains you or not over the course of its endless 90 minute runtime. This Scarface for schoolboys, this Wiggers as wise guys garbage is so hopelessly amateurish, so draped in its own sense of self-importance that when it belly flops and dies like a beached whale along the shores of filmic folly, you can't help but laugh at its dishonorable death throws. When that pathetic excuse for a pin-up named Paris Hilton is the absolute, 100%, without a doubt, take it to the bank, best thing about this movie - and she's barely humanly tolerable - you understand inherently why this half-assed crime comedy stinks like a local hooker with a raging yeast infection. Nothing about this movie works, and from the way it is scripted and directed, it's not hard to see why.

Whoever Saran Barnum is when he's at home, let's hope he finds a hobby PDQ. This so-called filmmaker obviously flunked out of his camerawork correspondence course, and took several incompletes in screenwriting basics to produce something as sensationally awful as this film. Utilizing about every clichéd technique in the Big Book of Indie Movie Mangling (flashbacks, fourth wall breaking, stylized slo-mo) and combining them with a script that thinks curse words and basic bodily functions are fundamentally fun, this quack Quentin can't decide if he's making True Romance with teeny boppers or Natural Born Killers with numbskulls. Instead, he opts for a little of both, pushing the limits of believability and disbelief suspension to the point where even a super steroided Jose Canseco couldn't handle the emotional or physical tolerances. Unfortunately, you can just see Barnun running around Tinsel Town, tape in hand, getting offers to direct the next straight to DVD sequence of some time honored horror franchise, all based on this sniveling shite. Instead of egging on this terrifying no-talent, Hollywood should show this hack his parent's basement door. Only problem is, he probably knows it all too well already.

The primary reason why The Hillz goes horse-hokey can be summed up in one simple word: story. In order to get an audience to invest its time in a group of felonious fools, criminals who common society normally wouldn't give the time of day to, you have to offer up something glamorous, or stylized, to provide a proper hook. Merely making your miscreants minors is not unusual or interesting enough. Then to have them be the most hateable, 'wish you could peel off their skin with a rusty knife' nauseating nimrods ever to disgrace a so-called drama is oppressive overkill. Duff's daring do is not dashing, just disgraceful. Steve 5's spastic sports jocularity comes across as catatonic. Seb's 'do the right thing' jingoism guarantees that he will be one of the first to bite the big one. And T's tendency to use insult humor and politically incorrect comebacks with mean-looking minorities also forewarns of his future as worm food. Heather is the only persona not plagued by a desire to show off like an Alpha Male Ape in a petting zoo. However, since she's also a skank as cipher, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to vivisect her, let alone date her. This is the most unlikable cast of cold, callous corncobs ever to support a hopeless homemade movie. They're so heinous in fact that you wonder why some award can't be given for most mangled use of the casting process. Surely there's some plaque somewhere to commemorate Barnum and The Hillz's horrid commune of community college theater major dullards.

Barnum also mangles his tone here, leaping between lethargic thriller and dumb dark black comedy so often that you wonder if he suffers from some manner of ambiance ADD. Instead of keeping his story serious, we are constantly thrown off by scenes that don't seem to make much sense. A cheerleader asks our crybaby crime boss to kill her glee team rival. They have some dumb, dopey banter, and then it's back to the drive-bys. In another sequence, Paris Hilton's rich rat boyfriend cracks a smile, and we see a single animated flash from his teeth, complete with cartoon sound effect. The class clown tries to prove he can out bench press the homoerotic muscle of the gang. The dipstick ends up with a bar holding about 10 pounds pressing on his neck, and his fellow hoodlums farting in his face. With every killing happening offscreen, not a single drop of blood bathing the screen or the actors, and an overall willy-nilly approach to death (there is never a consequence to the multiple murders we witness), Barnum and this bullspit seem to suggest that violence is the only way to permanently solve your problems. Such a notion really holds no persuasion in a far more civilized, sensible culture. Lucky for this movie then that it's made in the good old USA, where lawyers, guns and money can truly correct any act, criminal or otherwise.

This is moviemaking masturbation at its most banal, an unashamed attempt to tap directly into the video game, first person shooter sensibilities that rage through most disenfranchised white suburban stickboys. I guess we can be thankful that our cast of cretins decides to take its social vendetta out on the actual society, instead of a cafeteria full of classmates. Heaven, God, and a good set of psychiatrists please help the person who identifies or fully relates to this retardation. One would hope that the signal being sent by The Hillz was so reprehensible, so drenched in an unpleasant dopiness that no one could find a friendly facet to this film. But one fears that there are weed-whacked wannabes out there who have a wrath that no amount of bong hits can deaden, and the pointless pandering that this movie maintains will only fuel that foolish fire. While the creative community should never be held responsible for the psychotic actions of some sadistic stoners, The Hillz may be a precedent that no court could ignore. If it doesn't directly inspire the aggression, its terrible entertainment tenets would be enough to drive anyone to murderous acts of misplaced menace.

On the acting front, no one here redeems themselves. Rene Heger plays Duff like he's a pissed off Joey Lawrence. Jesse Woodrow somnambulates through his performance as Steve 5. Vince Rimoldi's T is like Hal Sparks without the humor (but extra homosexuality), and Eric Priestley finds a way to makes Seb both a simp and a wimp, which is genetically impossible without the right training. And then there is Paris. Look, there are plenty of hard-up guys out there who drool over this dishrag in a designer dress and claim they would tap her as quickly as a keg during Spring Break. Her questionable beauty aside, this walking advertisement for the perversion of privilege acts like a reject from a trailer park version of Suddenly, Last Summer. Her stare is so blank and vacant that the light from distant stars gets sucked into her corneas and lost in the vacuum of her vacuousness. One has to congratulate Barnum for finding the proper experimental film stock to capture this clear non-entity on camera. Without such an innovation, anyone acting alongside Ms. Hilton would look like they were carrying on a conversation with a pasty puff of outrageously expensive perfume. Frankly, the rest of this confederacy of crud are equally transparent. Not a single one of them can save their performance from the unpleasant aroma of direct to video vomit that The Hillz seems drenched in.

In the end, this film is just a waste of time, an hour and a half that plays like a life sentence in muddled movie years. The PR department responsible for the ad copy on the back of the disc has the audacity to name check, Boyz in the Hood, The O. C. and – of ALL things – A Clockwork Orange. If a certain Mr. Kubrick weren't already locked in Heaven's editing room, he'd be making his emergency mortuary reservations almost immediately after learning of that laughable pronouncement. About the only thing this juvenile joke has in common with Alex and his droogies is a tendency to consider random sexual assault as a part of the party mentality. Otherwise, that urban "z" is the closest this film will get to John Singleton's sensational debut.

If one had to draw a distinction between The Hillz and another film, the Michael Oliver opus known as Problem Child comes to mind. Each film focuses on some misguided kid who uses aggressive tactics to get his way. Each one introduces serial killing and mass murder into the storyline like it's humorous. And both movies feature acting so hideous that members of SAG are honestly considering a clause in their next collective bargaining agreement to ban outright such hammy histrionics. For some, the chance to spend yet another night with Paris may be enough to wade through this train wreck of a title. But that burning sensation you feel the morning after will have a lot more to do with entertainment atrocities, and not a severe case of affluent STDs. Unfortunately, there is no cure for the crabs The Hillz will give you. This is one dreary dose you'll just have to live with.

The Video:
If there is one singular, professional aspect of The Hillz, it would have to be the image. Though this is a low-budget bonanza from beginning to end, the 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is clean, sharp and more or less presentable. We do experience some grain in a couple of the night scenes, and director Barnum wouldn't know good composition or framing if it jumped up and bit him in the bollocks, but at least we don't have to sit through some out of focus, badly contrasted piece of non-color correct chum. While it still looks homemade, at least the recipe Barnum was using created something palatable, not totally pathetic.

The Audio:
Sonically, there are a lot of positive attributes to The Hillz. While the dialogue is derivative and filled with frighteningly bad writing, the aural aspects of the disc do capture it in crystal clarity. Unfortunately, Barnum must have lost a bet with his nu-metalhead pals, and was forced to fill out his soundtrack with enough Korn and Godsmack sound a likes to keep a nation of hedonistic headbangers in full air guitar crunching delight. On the plus side, this means we are saved the scurrilous scat of some ersatz-rap or hip hop horror. But the propensity toward power chords does occasionally make the Dolby Digital Stereo mix sound like an Iowa teenager's car stereo as it cruises through the local Wal-Mart parking lot on a Friday night.

The Extras:
Here's a laugh: someone, either Image (the DVD's distributor) or Halfway House Productions (Barnum's filmmaking front) decided that the screenplay for this film was so special that it deserved a .pdf file, DVD-Rom presentation. Frankly, this is the sole funny aspect of The Hillz. But if you think that bit of ballsy backslapping was amply arrogant, wait to you get a load of the full-length commentary track by Barnum, producer Jonathan Boyle, and cast members Rene Heger (Duff) and Jesse Woodrow (Steve 5). But be warned, you better get out a spade, a clothespin, and a good pair of BS shoveling boots. This motley crew lays it on pretty thick in the self-congratulation department. As a matter of fact, they are so convinced that this film is GOOD, that you'll think that not only was this company incompetent, but that they are delusional as well. Barnum flaunts the fact that he ran in Hilton's circles, and she approached him about the part. Boyle laments the lack of screen time for this drug dealer cameo, and both Woodrow and Heger reference James Dean, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro when discussing their thespian inspirations. The only saving grace here is that they quickly grow bored with their own baloney, and the conversation kind of peters out toward the end. If you want to hear a group of wannabes slurp on each other for nearly 90 minutes, then by all means, give this extra a listen. Otherwise, it's as pointless as the film it supports.

Final Thoughts:
Throughout the course of his conversation on the film, director Barnum talks about the numerous scenes and lines he stole from other movies. In the course of his hallucinatory diatribe, he references Scarface, Easy Rider, Carlito's Way, Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, and numerous other far more famous films. This all helps to support the theory that this filmmaker and his extended posse of peeps thought they were tapping into the wavelength of classic cinematic crime dramas. But all dream sequences, elliptical plotting, and campy cutting up aside, The Hillz is just an incredibly bad motion picture. It's not worth your time as a rental, or even a learning device for how NOT to make your own camcorder classic. Instead, it proves that something has to be done to get these technological terrors out of the hands of those incapable of adequately using them before more moviemaking misdemeanors can occur. Somewhere, in the great Beyond, the man who invented the hand held video camera is crying in Karmic agony. It appears his device is killing, not complimenting the celluloid standard. And if there is any cosmic justice, The Hillz will have to answer to the same afterlife authority. If there were a fate worse than damnation, this film would deserve it.

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