Hatchet (2006)


Until recently I had not heard of Hatchet, despite having the great Kane Hodder star as Vincent Crowley, the vengeful deformed creature at the center of the movie's mythology.  I have no idea how I didn't, but I was so disgusted with a good bit of horror from the 2000s that it doesn't surprise me that it would have gone under my radar.  It's called Hatchet, after all, and that kind of keeps great expectations at bay, especially when the movie poster can't even show an actual hatchet. 

Ben (Joel David Moore) is in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but he's depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend and is not really into the celebration.  Instead, he wants to go off on his own for a haunted swamp tour that he heard about.  Out of pity his friend Marcus (Deon Richmond) decides to leave the rest of their friends and come along with him.  However, the tour he heard about is closed, leaving him to book with a second-rate guide named Shawn (Parry Shen).  Also along for the ride are midwestern couple Jim (Richard Riehle) and Shannon Permatteo (Patrika Darbo), amateur porn producer Shapiro (Joel Murray), his two bickering actresses Misty (Mercedes McNab) and Jenna (Joleigh Fiore) and a local woman named Marybeth (Amara Zaragoza).

While the first part of the tour is no great shakes, things really begin to go wrong when the boat runs aground near what turns out to be the remains of Victor Crowley's house.  It turns out Marybeth came along because her father and brother were out hunting alligators and didn't come back, and she is afraid something happened to them because that particular part of the swamp is closed off.  That is for good reason, as Crowley, though thought killed by a prank gone wrong years before, is very much alive and determined to kill anyone who comes into his woods. 

The tagline for Hatchet is "Old school American horror."  I do respect what writer/director Adam Green was trying to do, which was start an entirely new franchise at a time when everything was sequels and remakes and get back to old-school practical effects with a team led by John Carl Buechler.  The makeup design for Crowley is amazing and Hodder gets to use his physical build to much better effect than he ever got to as Jason.  It's Mardi Gras, so of course there's a good amount of breasts to kick things off, and the director's cut doesn't hold back at all on the blood. 

Still, even with all these elements, the truth is that a lot of "old school American horror" films may have ambition and good effects but, just like the protagonists in the best of them, going off the beaten path is at one's own risk.  For every Halloween or Friday the 13th there's a Leprechaun lurking in the depths of the old video or DVD racks.  There were all the sequels to those movies (as there are for Hatchet as well), bringing ever-diminishing returns.  It also doesn't help that, just like with music, movies made during the 2000s have aged worse than any other decade.  Everything, from the attitudes of the characters, the references to Girls Gone Wild and the awful nu-metal theme song, screams out the decade it comes from. 

There-in lies the problem with Hatchet.  It has Hodder, it has cameos by Robert Englund and Tony Todd, but the movies they starred in back in the day, even if it was Jason Takes Manhattan, were so much better than this.  In an effort to try to try to get horror fans excited about something new Adam Green forgot that it takes more than effects and a bit of respect for what came before; it also takes a good story.  While Crowley's origin is one of the highlights of the movie, the rest is once again just people getting killed - adults instead of teenagers this time - one by one, with no reason to care that it's happening.  By being dull Hatchet commits the worst horror movie sin it can.

Hatchet (2006)
Time: 93 minutes
Starring: Kane Hodder, Joel David Moore, Deon Richmond, Amara Zaragoza
Director: Adam Green

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more