Hills Run Red [2009 Soundtrack]

Liner Note Author: Dave Parker.
First things first: this is not a soundtrack album to the 1966 Italian spaghetti Western Un Fiume Di Dollari, released in the U.S. in November 1967 under the title The Hills Run Red, with a score by veteran composer Ennio Morricone; it is the soundtrack album to the 2009 straight-to-video horror movie The Hills Run Red, which bears no relationship to the earlier film except the title, with a score by Frederik Wiedmann, a 2004 Suma Cum Laude graduate of the Berklee College of Music with a B.A. in Film Scoring, whose previous work includes another horror movie, Return to House on Haunted Hill. According to director Dave Parker, he and Wiedmann were not on the same page when they first met to discuss the picture's music. Parker saw his film as something of an homage to slasher films of the '70s like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and was looking for a score full of atonality and disturbing noise. But if Parker saw himself as another Tobe Hooper, Wiedmann seems to have seen him as Alfred Hitchcock, with himself as Bernard Herrmann, or so the music samples he left with Parker indicated. Parker, remarkably, didn't decide to find another composer; he adapted his concept to Wiedmann's more traditional approach, or so he says in the liner notes. In the event, Wiedmann also seems to have adapted himself to Parker; although he was allowed to write for full orchestra (the Czech Film Orchestra), his music, while employing many conventional styles of suspense, pursuit, and shock, also brings in plenty of industrial-strength sound-effects like noise, for a hybrid score seemingly intended to mix the best of the very old and classic with some of the not-so-old and pretty memorable. ~ William Ruhlmann