Looking for a little romance this Valentine’s Day? Give your loved one a true piece of your heart with…
Director: Patrick Lussier
Stars: Jensen Ackles, Jaime King, Kerr Smith, Tom Atkins
A group of Irish youths form a rock band in the mid 1980s, pioneering the shoegaze genre and…
Wait, what’s this about a pickaxe now?
Horror remakes were a dime a dozen in the 2000s. The year 2009 alone saw re-dos of FRIDAY THE 13TH, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, SORORITY ROW, and THE STEPFATHER, just to name a few. However, I’d go out on a limb and venture the resurrection of the cult 1981 Canadian horror flick MY BLOODY VALENTINE was the best of the bunch. Or considering the low bar those other movies set, at least the most memorable.
The Tom Atkins Fan Club meets every day in our hearts.
Coming from the team of writer Todd Farmer and director Patrick Lussier, whose future collaboration DRIVE ANGRY would become another Awfully Good favorite, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D doesn’t have the same outlandish, devil-may-care (pun intended) vibe of that Nicolas Cage classic, but it does excel and entertain in other ways. For one, it feels very much like a true 80s slasher rather than a pale rip-off or tongue-in-cheek homage like many modern horror flicks. The set-up, the characters, the kills—the whole thing just feels like it could comfortably fit in the genre a couple decades earlier.
What especially works well are all the kills and the killer. The miner makes for a menacing figure and the filmmakers go out of their way to carve out some truly great presentations of gore that showcase just how versatile a pickaxe can be as a weapon of mass murder. There’s pickaxes through the brain, pickaxes through the face, pickaxes through the gut, pickaxes through the eye… and just to shake things up, an eye through a pick axe. (Yes, there’s a difference.) And for even the most discerning romantic among us, there’s more than one disembodied heart ripped out of a chest and stuffed into a heart-shaped box of chocolates. It is a Valentine’s Day movie after all.
Somewhere an emo kid’s head explodes.
In case you care about things like “plot,” the film tells an epic story of insanity and murder in a small Pennsylvania mining town. In the late 90s, an accident left five miners trapped with only one survivor—Harry Warden, who it turns out went crazy and killed everyone else to conserve oxygen. When he later escapes (on Valentine’s Day, of course), he goes on a rampage and murders dozens at a hospital and then returns to the mine to kill a bunch of teens who were partying there. Warden is shot, but his body is never recovered. Cut to 10 years later, one of the surviving teens returns to the still-reeling town and reconnects with his former friends on V-Day weekend, only for the pickaxe murderer to return again to finish what he started.
The movie is filled with more story than most similar horror films and the whodunit aspect adds some twists and turns that keep things engaging. <Semi-spoiler alert> And having a different killer than the 1981 movie leaves room enough for any fans of the original to still be surprised.</spoiler>.
Just another in a long line of men to discover their wife loves Supernatural more than she loves him.
Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles and Dawson’s Creek star Kerr Smith play the dueling leading men, with Jaime King assuming scream queen duties. All are fine with their respective roles, enough to service the material, but nothing more to stand out. (Although, Smith has a tendency to over-deliver on some of his lines in humorous ways.) The amazing Tom Atkins (HALLOWEEN III) has a brief part as a former sheriff and is so great in his handful of scenes that you wish he was in more. Although that’s true for pretty much everything Tom Atkins is in.
I also have to give special kudos to Betsy Rue for spending nearly her entire performance in MY BLOODY VALENTINE wearing pretty much only her screams, as a woman who gets chased by the killer throughout a motel complex completely naked. I’m sure those were not easy or fun scenes to film, but I will probably never remember anything Kerr Smith does in this movie and everyone will always remember her scenes, so her work was not in vain.
“This movie is 3D as f*ck!”
One other element that sets this movie apart is the use of 3D. This came out around the time the 3D craze was taking off again (although it predates AVATAR by nearly a year). Yes, it’s a little gimmicky, but Lussier uses it pretty wisely throughout. It’s mostly subtle work, adding depth to scenes here and there with the occasional pop of over-the-top, in-your-face moments to add some excitement. I remember watching this in the theater and enjoying the 3D, but it's still watchable now considering no one is actually viewing it in that format a decade on.
So, is it worth revisiting this Valentine’s Day weekend? The film’s first and third acts are pretty strong, with lots of excitement and action to kick and cap things off. The middle may lag, lacking the strong performances needed to boost the pickaxe-less parts, but I think the bloody pros definitely outweigh any cons here. If you need a good dash of gore to balance out any forced rom-coms this February 14th, I consider it one of the rare times where a remake wasn’t a terrible idea.
Betsy Rue deserves a lifetime achievement award in this category.
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Thanks to Ian, Jamie, and Ben for suggesting this week’s movie!
Seen a movie that should be featured on this column? Shoot Jason an email and give him an excuse to drink.