3-D Valentine a Bloody Throwback
It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles) has returned to the small mining community he used to call home ten years after a brutal massacre took the lives of 22 people. With the recent death of his father, he’s decided to sell the family’s mine, and virtually no one in town is happy about it. But the young man was there when Harry Warden (Rich Walters) went on his murder spree, and he was left sprawled out on the ground, helpless as the psychopath nearly murdered his girlfriend, Sarah (Jaime King). Tom wants no part of the mine or the town, and the sooner he can be rid of both, the better.
Leave it to Sarah, now married to Tom’s former best frenemy Axl Palmer (Kerr Smith), to convince him that maybe he’s in the wrong. But before he can publicly change his mind about selling, history starts to repeat itself with the arrival of a vicious killer wearing a mining suit and wielding a lethal pickaxe. Soon, this killing machine is laying waste to everyone and anyone who crosses their path, especially those who managed to survive a decade prior, and it looks like Tom, Sarah, and Axl are next on the list for a gory Valentine’s Day dismembering.
Slick, straightforward, and made with gleeful old-fashioned whimsy, the 3-D remake of 1981’s My Bloody Valentine has way more going for it than I admittedly anticipated there was going to be before entering the theater. This is still a Friday the 13th meets Halloween retread gussied up with modern digital and makeup effect trickery, but when everything is handled with this much care and attention to detail, that’s all the good. The viscera and intestinal fluids fly straight at the audience with all the freewheeling fury of a Tom & Jerry cartoon gone completely berserk, and for audiences interested in that sort of thing, this energetic redo can be a great deal of fun.
Director Patrick Lussier (Dracula 2000) handles everything with old-school, workmanlike precision, and considering he’s spent so much of his career working alongside Wes Craven as an editor on several pictures (notably Scream 2, Scream 3, and Red Eye), this isn’t altogether shocking. Better, thanks to some fantastic 3-D effects, even moments reeking of routine familiarity end up being moderately thrilling. The opening sequence showcasing Harry Warden’s first killing spree is superb, while an early set piece at a dilapidated roadside motel is outstanding. These moments have a viscerally unsettling ferocity to them that I found more than impressive.
Granted, we’re not talking rocket science here. Screenwriters Todd Farmer and Zane Smith don’t stray too far away from the 1981 original, and if they do shake things up here and there, not enough so that any of their more aggressive twists or turns will likely surprise anyone. A case could also be made that this remake has High Tension syndrome. If I spent too much time thinking about all of this nonsense, based entirely on what happens during the last 10 minutes, I think I could make a good case that precious little that transpires throughout would be narratively possible.
For the life of me, I can’t work up the energy to be as angry about any of that as maybe I should be. Genre fanatics will delight in all the hacking, slashing, stabbing, eviscerating, and head-splitting, and they’ll cheer the presence of seasoned pros like Tom Atkins and Kevin Tighe, both of whom make every second of their screen time an absolute delight. While some of the better gags are lifted from similar motion pictures (most notably Friday the 13th Part 3 and Wrong Turn), in modern digital 3-D, these scenes still manage to pack a hideously effective punch that’s entirely different than what any of their predecessors offered up.
There isn’t really too much else to say. This new My Bloody Valentine is a goofy and gruesome throwback gussied up with the latest in 3-D technology. It’s a blood-spattered blast.
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
