There are big familial shoes to fill when your last name is Romero and you’re tackling the horror genre, which is unfortunately part of the problem of outsized expectations that weighs down Staunton Hill, a thin bouillabaisse of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and a half dozen other horror flicks, directed by Cameron Romero, son of zombie flick godhead George Romero.

Set in the autumn of 1969, for seemingly no other reason than to give its subjects the chance to talk about “the rally” in Washington, D.C., the movie centers on a group of five college-age kids hitchhiking through a remote mountainous region of Virginia. There’s Boone (Kiko Ellsworth) and Raina (Christine Carlo), Jordan (the strangely named Cristen Coppen), Cole (David Rountree, also the film’s writer) and Cole’s old crush Trish (Paula Rhodes). After hooking up with Quintin (Charlie Bodin), a nice young guy who offers to give them a ride, the group makes it a couple dozen miles deeper into the woods before Quintin’s beat-up truck breaks down. After holing up in what they think is an abandoned barn for the night, in the morning they unwittingly stumble across the Staunton family, for whom the nearby hill is named. They subsequently find themselves at the mercy of a depraved, diabolical brood (headed up by the tubby Kathy Lamkin) that will stop at nothing to rid their property of these “trespassers.” The only law on Staunton’s Hill is the law of the Stauntons, and in this case, not too surprisingly, the penalty for defying that law is death.

The work of the actors here is a bit uneven, but for the most part naturalistic and vacuumed free of histrionics, though Coppen is a late offender in this regard. Rountree’s screenplay baits a passably intriguing if somewhat familiar premise, but ignores the basic dynamics of group interaction by allowing Quintin to steer some collective decision-making. The film’s twist is tipped fairly early on by Romero’s use of affected flashbacks/flashforwards, so by the time the requisite big, lumbering, retarded guy in overalls, Buddy (B.J. Hendricks), starts dropping people with shovels to the face, one has a fairly fixed sense of where this is headed. The remaining thrills, in either gore or suspense, don’t connect enough in level of execution, and the final reel sags tremendously, including a two-minute tracking shot of a putative escape. Sans closing credits, in fact, Staunton Hill clocks in at an undernourished 81 minutes. Of note, however, is composer Jesper Kyd’s music, which is superlative.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a hollowed-out spindle area to reduce the amount of plastic used, Staunton Hill comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. The title is divided into 12 chapters via a separate static menu screen, but there are no supplemental features, which further dents any collectible value. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) D- (Disc)