Are you truly so sick of unnecessary remakes and shitty watered down Japanese horror rip offs that a movie like Hatchet is a beacon of shining light? Really? Unless we watched different movies called Hatchet that by some strange coincidence both came out this year then the internet horror community cannot be trusted.
First you burned me with Dead and Breakfast*, which is easily the worst combination of horror and comedy to come out in the last five years. Then you go apeshit about Behind the Mask, a movie that so fundamentally misunderstands slasher films that it creates an archetype known as the "Ahab", conveniently ignoring the fact that the only slasher series with a hero character hunting the villain consistently is Halloween. (And that's the tip of the "what's wrong with Leslie Vernon" iceberg.) And now Hatchet.
According to the box, Hatchet is:
"The Next Icon of Horror" - Ain't It Cool News
"Among the Greatest Slasher Flicks of All Time" - Bloody Disgusting
"Has Audiences Shedding Tears of Terror -- And Laughter" - MTV
"So Indescribably Awesome that You Cannot Conceive." -Ain't It Cool News
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. And FUCKING WRONG!
This cannot possibly be the movie you're describing on the box. It can't. The horror community cannot possibly be so strapped that this painfully unfunny, badly paced, woefully scare-less waste of eighty four minutes could be OLD SCHOOL AMERICAN HORROR (which is the TAGLINE for the movie right under the title).
For starters, the has all the aesthetic value of a Sci-Fi Channel original film, the kind of which are meant to look "theatrical" but all the mise-en-scene points to "will translate well to tv", which is what nearly every shot does. It's hard to find a point in this movie, during which most of the film takes place at night in a swamp, where the actors aren't totally lit. I mean with BRIGHT overhead lights that seem to be aimed directly at them. The shot composition leans on the "show everbody" side, which makes the "surprise" appearance of the killer that much more nonsensical.
It's embarassing when I can point to lesser sequels of Friday the 13th that have better camerawork and composition than Hatchet, but it's true. The stunt casting is almost irrelevant, since most people won't even notice that Blair Witch Project's Joshua Leonard is the other dude who dies with Robert Englund, and Tony Todd just barely qualifies for a cameo. There's a perfectly ruined opportunity involving the ambiguous death of Kane Hodder's character to introduce a second killer into the proceedings.
I don't even want to talk about the "killer", Victor Crowley, because after a pretty nice backstory, he's pretty much wasted in the rest of the film. I hate to break it to you, but there is some strange internal logic at work in the Friday the 13th and Halloween films about where and when Jason and Michael Meyers show up. This is wholly lacking in Hatchet, as
The pacing is all over the map, including a coda that happens so close to the climax you aren't actually sure the movie's ending yet, a much too long "getting to the bad place" expositional period, and a big plan that serves no purpose. It doesn't even work in an ironic way, so if that's what they were trying to do by subverting expectations, they failed.
I really can't understand how you could covet this film as real, quality horror. Hatchet fails on almost every level, and while I hate this remakitis and J-Horror influx as much as anyone else, you can't seriously tell me this movie is on par with Slither. Slither is genuinely good American horror, and it's fucking funny. Jeez, even Feast, which masks most of its problems with sheer ferocity and manic energy, is light years better than Hatchet. And Feast came from Project Greenlight, for chrissakes!
If Hatchet is what's good about horror, then I'm a fan of the wrong genre. This ain't old fashioned anything, unless you like celebrating the Splatter University's of slasher flicks. This is like watching the remake of 2000 Maniacs and saying "man, this sure reminds me of the good old days of horror!" Maybe you should look a little harder then, because I'd hate to think I'm alone in liking old school horror. I'll admit to going out on a limb defending Dead Silence, even weakly, but at least it dared to suck no matter who watched it. I can't imagine the defense for Hatchet; there just isn't anything inventive or particularly redeeming in the film.
* I would like any of you to explain to me how Dead and Breakfast is in any way an "American Shaun of the Dead", as the cover art boasts. Please. I'd love to hear that argument.
** Don't even fucking start with me about Jason. Don't. Jason Vorhees is pretty much a normal dude in parts 2-5, and when he turns "zombie" in Jason Lives, then the Kane Hodder super monster has some retarded justification.
1 comment:
You know I like both Dead and Breakfast and Hatchet but not nearly as much as Slither or any of the original late 70's early 80's flicks.
Comparing movies to others can sometime be very misleading. Shaun of the dead and Slither were the only two good com-hor flicks to come since Shocker or the Tales from the Crypt movies.
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