‘Bloody’ awful in all three dimensions

My Bloody Valentine 3-D
Review by Nathan Weinbender

I stopped to look at the posters for “My Bloody Valentine 3-D” before I went into the theater. It shows a cinema filled with clean-cut teenagers, all wearing goofy 3-D glasses and orgiastic expressions of terror and glee. A giant pickaxe has broken through the screen and is swiping at the teens in the front row, no doubt an accurate representation of the film’s effects. “A 3-D ride to Hell!” the tagline screams. It looked like it could be fun.

Turns out that the posters are more exciting than the movie itself. “My Bloody Valentine” is a routine hack-and-slash gorefest that plays like a shopping spree at Cliché Mart, and the fact that it’s in middling 3-D merely underscores the fact that the filmmakers obviously had no faith in the quality of their production from the get-go.

See, 3-D is a blessing for movie producers. It’s a cheap gimmick that secures big box office intake—not only are ticket prices for 3-D features higher, but people can’t replicate the 3-D experience at home and will be sure to check it out in theaters (the movie has already grossed more than $40 million in two weeks of release).

But it also takes a lot of pressure off those poor, poor movie financiers, who normally have to worry about delivering a quality product. They can sit back and relax, because with a 3-D picture all they have to think about is what objects they can throw at the audience to make them jump in their seats.

In “My Bloody Valentine” we get gouged eyeballs, splattered blood, tree branches and a severed jaw tossed at us. Oh, and pickaxes—lots and lots of pickaxes. I grew wearier with each new plunging pickaxe shot, and I told myself that there’s certainly no way this movie could possibly muster another one. And then, whaddaya know, the bloody end of a pickaxe came tearing through the screen, and I checked my watch again.

The plot, recycled from a 1981 Canadian film, is a real yawner, involving a killer miner on the loose in a small town on Valentine’s Day, and it doesn’t have a single original thought in its beaten, bloodied head. Its only concerns are gore, nudity and the 3-D effects, which I’m sure is all its target audience cares about anyway.

But I was bored. Really, really bored. I appreciate that 3-D technology has made leaps and bounds in the last few years, but they are still far from perfecting it. 3-D movies rely heavily on their effects, but I have yet to see a 3-D feature that really benefits from the 3-D, or one that uses the technique as a way to bolster its story.

And although we’ve advanced beyond the days of cheesy cardboard glasses with red and blue lenses, we’re still being treated to the same silly effects. Will there ever be a 3-D picture where the characters don’t point gun barrels directly at the camera? It has all grown so tiresome.

Grade: D-

Directed by Patrick Lussier. Written by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith; based on a screenplay by John Beaird. Starring Jensen Ackles, Jaime King, Kerr Smith, Betsy Rue, Edi Gathegi and Tom Atkins. R; 101m.

“It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Halloween
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Halloween” is the essential American horror film. No other movie in its genre has been as influential, as effective, as brilliantly realized.

Very few thrillers have ever been as economical as “Halloween,” and it serves as proof that carnage was not always at the heart of horror pictures. When so many directors focus one what horrible creatures will leap from the shadows, John Carpenter was more concerned with the lurking prospects of the shadows themselves.

“Halloween” was produced for just over $300,000 in the spring of 1978, and it went on to gross nearly $50 million at the box office, making it the most profitable independent film of its time. Why was it so successful? For the same reason, I think, that the haunted house at a carnival is popular—people respond strongly to being really, truly scared, and “Halloween” is very, very scary.

It is also one of the most stylish slasher movies ever, a fact made evident during the film’s opening moments, a long tracking shot that takes on the point of view of a young boy as he stabs his sister to death. Flash forward fifteen years, and the little boy, now grown, escapes from the confines of his mental institution and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween day.

The killer (simply credited as “The Shape,” he later became known as Michael Myers), donning a creepy white mask, begins to hack and slash his way through any teenager that gets in the way of his knife. Our heroine is a plucky Jamie Lee Curtis (making her feature debut), who is stuck babysitting two neighborhood kids as her promiscuous friends turn up dead.

On Michael’s tracks is Donald Pleasence, who was Michael’s childhood psychiatrist and knows what he is capable of. “Death has come to your little town,” he tells the sheriff, who brushes off the threats. It’s too late anyway.

Modern-day horror films relish violence and brutality, and so many directors wrongly assume that blatant sadism is automatically scary. Look at the “Hostel” and “Saw” series, in which the stories are constructed around the gruesome deaths, or the woeful remakes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Halloween,” which drain the originals of their tension and practically splatter the camera with viscera.

So many scenes in “Halloween” would be easy to spoil with overbearing music, gratuitous gore or rapid-fire editing (all traits with which today’s moviegoers are no doubt familiar). But Carpenter is a master of his medium, and there are moments in this film that have been constructed so tightly that I can’t imagine them being any more effective.

Take, for instance, the famous moment near the end of the film where Curtis thinks she has killed Michael. Of course, he isn’t dead, and as she cowers in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, Michael—who has been lying inert on a bed over Curtis’ shoulder—silently sits up. Chilling.

I can think of at least a dozen modern directors that would supply that moment with a musical sting, or would cut to a close-up shot. It wouldn’t be necessary. Carpenter utilizes his camera superbly, and how he juxtaposes the main action in the foreground with glimpses of ominous figures in the background is one of the film’s great successes.

“Halloween” was the film that single-handedly inspired the boom slasher films in the ‘80s, and although it has spawned sequels, remakes, imitations and spoofs, none of them have captured the electricity that Carpenter did here. Most horror films are sledgehammers; this one is a scalpel.

Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Debra Hill and Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers and Nick Castle. R; 91m.