Hatchet (06, Adam Green)

It seems to me that even though so many horror filmmakers are looking back to the 70's and 80's, the viable updates on the slasher flick are almost exclusively Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes and Eli Roth's trailer for Thanksgiving (which is better than any of the slack-jawed yokel's real films). With the tagline "Old school American horror," a who's who of slasher icons, and John Carl Buechler doing makeup, I couldn't have been more excited. Naturally, the film let me down quite a bit, but it gets quite a bit right. The whole setup with spring break and the Girls Gone Wild parody isn't exactly original, funny, or interesting, but the poor writing fits the genre like a glove. The fact that Kane Hodder plays the Jason-like villain and Buechler goes crazy with some recreations of the tragically truncated bits from Friday the 13th Part VII would have you think that this will surely be a superior slasher offering. The opening's very promising with hillbillies, lewd dialogue, and a hillbilly drinking pee. This kind of stuff is pure 1982. Add to that a very brutal opening kill, and you have, as I said, a very definite notion that the director knows what he's doing. The story stuff's not even too bad, but it's when it gets to the tense material that the film loses. The lighting's all wrong, giving you a full view of the background in, say, the middle of the woods. The gore effects are pretty amazing, taking a lot of Buechler's other material and doing it with reckless abandon. Unfortunately, they also lack a certain amount of impact, possibly due to the effects but more likely to do with the sound design and direction. Some have complained about the killer coming and coming and coming being silly, but that's one of the key foundations. The complete disregard for peripheral vision in the film leads to a bunch of scenes where a group of 5 people all looking different ways can be snuck up on because they're not able to look left of right. Hold your hands up to your temples and block off your side sight. That's what these people do. I guess we could pretend the thing's a simple comedy, but I think that would make me place it more with Club Dread than The Burning. Flick does get points for being relatively unrelenting and having a real killer of an ending, but it's so poorly done in a lot of aspects, so I'm not sure what it merit would be on a rewatch. *** out've *****