2.5/5 stars
I hate horror movies. There, my secret’s out, I’ve emerged from the cheezily gory, teen sex-infused, poorly plotted, frustratingly popular closet.
My animosity emerges partly from the disheartening standardization of the genre, where it’s actually accepted as funny that they’re all exactly the same, giving studio execs license to happily vomit the same tripe into our mouths ad infinitum like some wicked mother bird trying to silence her bratty, flightless children.
They also make me mad because some of them are actually scary, like, I have to call someone when I get home and all the lights are off, because if whatever terror is really waiting there to get me I want someone to notify Scooby and the gang so they have somewhere to start looking for the body. Assuming they can lay off the cannabis long enough to remember where they parked the Mystery Machine.
Some of my cynicism has dissipated with the realization that last year’s Quarantine, a handicam zombie movie set in an LA apartment complex, was the second best movie of 2008. It was a fun, pants-wetting, moody, visceral experience worth far more than the ticket price.
Having become attained a slightly stronger stomach for horror films, I reluctantly followed a group of friends into My Bloody Valentine 3D, a remake of the cult 1981 Canadian slasher about a series of murders on Valentine’s Day committed by someone dressed in a coal miner’s get-up, complete with a Darth Vader-esque breathing apparatus and a seemingly limitless supply of randomly-manifesting pickaxes.
The modern update follows the same basic premise, sans a lot of the actual atmospheric terror build-up in favor of just blithely murdering whatever poor sap the killer happens to bump into.
The original really drove home that these murders took place on Valentine’s Day, murders about lost love with a healthy helping of psychotic rage to really get the serial killer pasta pot boiling. This remake is mainly an episode of One Tree Hill attended by the spawn of some unholy threesome between BTK, Son of Sam and the Boston Strangler, with dialogue written at the caliber of a Beverly Hills 90210 fanfiction site.
I told you so, responds my readers, it’s exactly how we said it would be. Well pardon me for having a little hope, I say. Though oddly enough this movie was a little harder to score than I thought it would be. One would think that if I can easily hand out a one-star score for Benjamin Button then I should be fast approaching negative infinity with a movie that has a scene with a dwarf getting impaled on a pickax and electrified by a Motel 6 light fixture. However, it is a movie that is designed to be this stupid in every way technically a failure?
Okay, yes, it is.
That being said, it’s a fairly decent stupid in every way technical failure. Did you laugh a little when I mentioned that one scene where a person gets cleaved and electrocuted? If so, you might want to check this movie out, as it’s filled to bursting with campy horror violence and goofy situations in which to commit it. I know I was in the minority of people in the theater giggling the entire time, but it’s so finely crafted in its sheer intellectual ineptitude, so carefully measured in its degree of ridiculous wholesale slaughter. You really have to appreciate a movie that is basically a re-cap of the last 20 years of horror flicks, almost like a lost copy of Scary Movie 5? that takes itself way, way too seriously.
It’s also a great movie to share with others, for while I gleefully pedaled my legs in mid-air at a woman’s head getting split in half by a square point gardening shovel I was also slowly losing blood circulation in my right hand as my female companion in the adjacent seat broke my fingers in what can only be described as a death grip. Admittedly, though, she was as terrified by a man with a gas mask for a face as much as she had been of a movie trailer for an evil basement not 20 minutes earlier, so take that as you will.
The other big selling point of this film has been the IN THREE DIMENSIONS subtitle that has was unabashedly slapped onto the face of every poster made, and this is a double-edged sword, too.
Yes, it is very funny when a human eye pops out on the blunted metal tip of a pickax that currently resides in the corpus callosum of a human skull right in your face, but it is also extremely silly. I don’t actually think the directors intended the movie to be this silly, because everything looks so real, so pop-up-book-ish that there is no moment in the movie I could ever even begin to consider being remotely afraid. And while sometimes it all seems to be about the spectacle of just throwing warm body parts at you, the middle of the film is just a bunch of people talking to each other about their feelings and no one even considers sticking things like golf clubs in our face to go “ooh, look at what I can do!” It seems like a waste to not keep the stupid train running all the way through.
It is stupid, it is funny, it is violent, it is bad and it is $10 if you want to see it in 3D at night for student prices, and bear in mind only a few theaters offer the film in 3D so check in advance. Consider these factors and choose accordingly, because I’m giving this a neutral score.
Also, just to make sure I’m putting it clear and in writing, yes, My Bloody Valentine 3D is a better movie than Benjamin Button.
