User reviews

A very bizarre low budget comedy about two men who take to the woods to purge their obsessive attraction to a woman named Vera who dumped them both for a shmuck. This quirky little film is on the verge of being hilarious. However, it never quite gets all the laughs it shoots for. As a result, it is only mildly amusing, but worth a viewing if you're in the mood for something light and off the beaten path.

This is a prime example of what could have only looked liberating at its particular moment in time, when the spirit of 60s youth was starting to really take off but hadn't really found its own voice yet. A very few years later this kind of glorified home movie would look like an average student project, not a recipe for a bold new American cinema. But at the time, it was something rare simply for being a non-exploitation American independent feature, anad offering a break from Hollywood formulas. The pretext (you can't really call it a "plot") is that the two young heroes have taken too long courting their love Vera (played by two different actresses to represent the different ways the see her), so she's gone ahead and married someone else. They retreat to the woods to "get over it," or something, while there are flashbacks to their failed romancing and Vera's protective/nagging parents.

But really, all that happens is that the leads perform amateur slapstick (about on the level of the filler montages on "The Monkees" a couple years later), make funny faces, and run around (sometimes discreetly naked) in the snow a lot with the recklessness of youth. Sometimes the silliness is heightened by slo-mo, fast-mo, and other simple tricks. The film would seem completely rudderless and formless if not for the diverse original music score, which is far better than it deserves (and whose composer also scored a number of other offbeat films). The performers are game, and a couple of them have the kind of looks that might have worked in a professional context/ Nut very quickly their repetitious antics grow no more interesting than watching teenagers cannonball at your neighbor's pool party.

High spirits alone aren't automatically compelling; you actually need some ideas and structure to create art, or even just entertainment. "Hallelujah the Hills" is a historical curio of value, but it's very hard to argue that it is successful as either art or entertainment---it's just some people's glorified home-movie lark (admittedly one whose camera manages that manages to stay in focus the whole time) that briefly seemed special because back then almost nobody was glorifying their home movies...yet. If you think the similar Beat goof-off-fest "Beat My Daisy" is one of the great films of all time, you might actually think more of "Hallelujah" than I did. I'm glad I finally saw it, but can't imagine ever wanting to again.