3-D Valentine a Bloody Throwback
Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles) has returned to the small mining community he used to call home ten years after the brutal Valentine’s Day massacre which took the lives of 22 people. He has come back after the passing of his father to sell the town’s only financial reason to exist, too many memories haunting his every moment for him to ever feel comfortable moving back and running the day-to-day operations himself.
Jensen Ackles in Lionsgate Films' My Bloody Valentine
Just at the point former love of his life Sarah Palmer (Jaime King) has him convinced maybe he’s in the wrong, history begins to repeat itself with the arrival of a vicious murder wearing a mining suit and wielding a lethal pickaxe. Soon this killing machine is laying waste to all those he missed a decade previous, Tom, Sarah and her husband Axl (Kerr Smith), the town’s sheriff, next on his list for bloody retribution.
Slick, straight-forward and made with a gleeful old-fashioned whimsy hard to detest, the remake of 1981’s My Bloody Valentine plays things pretty close to the vest. This is nothing more than a Friday the 13th meets Halloween retread gussied up in modern day gore, the viscera and intestinal fluids flying with all the freewheeling fury of a “Tom & Jerry” cartoon gone completely berserk.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with this. Sure there isn’t much in the way of story and yes director Patrick Lussier’s (Dracula 2000) handling of it all isn’t exactly fresh but considering the subject matter and the audience the film is aimed at sitting through it isn’t anything close to a chore. Better, thanks to some fantastic 3-D effects even with the routine familiarity can actually be kind of thrilling, the early moments in particular having a viscerally unsettling effectiveness that almost commendable.
What I do have a problem with are films that insist on having twists that make everything you’ve just watched become a massive figment of the imagination. It is almost as if the movie has decided to spend 90 or so minutes lying to you, only showing the truth in the final seconds meaning any emotional investment you may have made meant nothing in regards to the storyline's ultimate designs.
There are cases when this works, but those examples tend to be both light on their feet and diligent enough in their plotting to supply all the clues needed to decipher the almost phantom-like riddle at their core. Movies like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense get away with it not because they’ve lied any less, but because the actual truth is written on every frame, the generated fantasy leading to a honestly obtained revelation they otherwise wouldn’t have achieved without such intelligently constructed duplicity.
That is not the case here. My Bloody Valentine is an idiotic B-horror movie that follows the usual slasher blueprint start to almost finish, and by the time the lame twist rears its ugly head it’s already become more than apparent the reasoning for it occur is completely nonsensical. It’s a dorky finish to what otherwise would have been a decent genre throwback, and while it doesn’t lay waste to all the somewhat masochistic delights which came before it does come just close enough I couldn't help but feel a slight twinge of disappointment.
We’re not talking rocket science here, however, and for the life of me I can’t work up the energy to be as angry as maybe I probably should. Fans of this sort of thing are going to delight in all the hacking, slashing, stabbing, eviscerating and head-splitting, and while some of the better gags are lifted straight out of other, similar motion pictures (most notably Friday the 13th Part 3 and Wrong Turn) in 3-D they pack a hideous punch entirely different than that of their predecessors.
There isn’t really too much else to say. Most viewers already know whether or not something like My Bloody Valentine is their cup of tea, and nothing I say is going to convince them one way or the other as to this one’s quality. Personally, thanks to that stupid turn of climactic events I think it’s at best okay, and not even a three dimensional pickaxe to the jugular is going to get me to say otherwise.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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