DVD Review: My Bloody Valentine

Image from Wikipedia

"Happy f**king Valentine's Day!" That line, spoken by veteran horror/schlock star, Tom Atkins, sets the tone for the quality of dialogue in the remake of My Bloody Valentine.  After a montage of animated newspaper images and voice overs of a mine disaster flash by (the film was originally in 3D, made painfully clear by the staging of many shots), the film starts out with the bad guy escaping, and then to a bunch of kids partying in a mine shaft.

You read that right. In order to have the killings take place in a mine, they've got a literal underground party going on here.  The ridiculousness of that aside, I've got to say, they didn't stretch out the film before getting to the gore. At less than ten minutes in, the body count is at least to a dozen.

Image from FanSiter

The key to enjoying a film like this, is to go in with low to zero expectations. And by "film like this," I mean the string of remakes of classic horror films of the 70s and 80s. By the time they got to My Bloody Valentine, they'd reached sub-classic status. It was in the C- to D-list range in the slasher pantheon. I'm expecting Terror Train to be made next.

Anyway, the first round of bloodiness centers around a demented, seemingly indestructible (like Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers) coal miner. He doesn't seem to have motivation, but since when do movie serial killers have any real motivation? Not here. Nothing beyond typical horror movie psychosis.  Every single cliched slasher trope is here: whimpering girls unable to keep quiet near the killer, characters doing what no human would do in those circumstances, the ability for the killer to be everywhere at once, false scares, running through the woods. . . Bouncing boobies, even full-frontal female and full-backal male nudity. The stuff intended for 3D is a throwback to Friday the 13th Part III, right down to the eyeball gag.  And like any Part I in a rebooted series, it is of course left open for a sequel.

But you know what? It kinda works.  For what it is--and it is an 80's-style slasher movie--it's pretty good. It's certainly better than any of the late Friday or even Halloween sequels.  There is some genuine suspense, a shock here and there, buckets of blood, a body-count to rival any in the genre, and it manages to keep you guessing, when these things are usually fairly obvious.  Add to that capable acting by (most) of the actors, particularly Kerr Smith (Dawson's Creek), Jaime King and--hubba, hubba--Jensen Ackles (Supernatural), and you're in for a fun time. Provided that you don't expect any more from it than what it is.

Recommended (for what it is)