My Bloody Valentine 3D (Patrick Lussier, 2009): USA
Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed on DVD.
3D film is a contentious subject. If you are the film industry, then it is the savior of cinema, ushering in a new wave of immersive experience and unlocking the medium’s true potential. If you are film critic Mark Kermode, then it is simply a way to make it impossible to pirate films in theaters, and a way to make us pay more for the privilege. And if you are me, well, the last time you saw a film in 3D was back in 1991 when the last few minutes of the Nightmare on Elm Street finale, ‘Freddy’s Dead’, waved a lot of long, pointy things at the audience. In keeping with my last 3D experience I’m be returning to the holy grail/gimmick (delete as appropriate) with a horror film and, because we only had 2 pairs of the blue and red specs and five people crowded round the TV, I watched My Bloody Valentine 3D in 2D. Confused? Well, then you’ll understand how I felt as I wondered how on earth this festering bile-duct of a film managed to make it into theaters!
This is a slasher film, so do you really need to know the plot? Really? Well, OK, it goes something like this. 11 years ago there was a cave in at a mine. Because of a mistake made by Tom (Jensen Ackles), the mine-owner’s son, the air supply to the trapped man was limited and one of them apparently kills the others to save air and himself. He is rescued but slips into a coma. A year later he wakes up and returns to the mine where, wouldn’t you know it, a group of teenagers are having a Valentine’s Day party. Pick-axe-murder hi-jinks ensue, the killer is apparently killed and all is well. Or at least it is until ten years later when Tom returns to town, just as locals start to get intimate with pointy sticks once again. Murder, death, mayhem, nudity, and ‘I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids’ ensues.
It all seems pretty much of a muchness for slasher, so why do I hate it so? Well, let’s start with the script. A three year old could have produced more convincing dialogue. The horror genre is one of the places that you get to go wild, to push the boundaries of the imagination. Why play it safe when the only limits are your imagination? Still, I guess when you’re dragging 80s slashers back from the grave, your imagination might not be your strongest point.
My second issue is with the visuals. As far as I’m concerned it is a HUGE mistake to use CGI for gore. Icky, sticky, nasty guts need to be tangible. Sadly My Bloody Valentine decided to go the virtual route. When a CGI eyeball rises up from someone’s head on the end of the pick-axe, it looks like the three year old responsible for the script had been let loose again. Even worse was a split head sliding down a shovel which looked like it was floating in mid air. Perhaps it might have looked better in 3D, but if you can watch it in flat-vision then I can condemn it in flat-vision. And that brings us on to the third problem.
Since watching this film I’ve also seen Coraline, another film released in 3D in theaters. There’ll be a full review soon, but in short it’s marvelous, even in 2D. When watching it I rarely thought ‘ah, that was there for the 3D effect’, something I did continuously in this film. More importantly, I never thought ‘was the person who turned this into a 2D version blind? Having not seen the 3D effect, I can’t say if it was as bad as the 2D nonsense that I suffered through, but My Bloody Valentine has a strange ‘green-screen’ syndrome. Everyone looks as though they’ve been cut out (from cardboard, judging by most of the acting) and stuck on top of the picture. Nothing seemed connected to anything else. I honestly can’t believe that anyone at Lionsgate looked at this and thought it was acceptable.
Before this review goes on as long as the film did (and it went on, and on, and on…), I’ll wrap things up with a slasher film checklist. Did I jump? Not really. Was there a satisfying helping of gore? Nope. Gratuitous nudity? Yup, in a ridiculously extended scene of full-frontal female nudity (people crying ‘hang on, she’s still naked?’ as we watched), though camera angles mysteriously spare us from the sight of 3D trucker-penis. Did I have fun? No. The entire troupe of characters was unlikeable in some way – from doormat to cheating spouse, you’ll find it hard to root for anyone to make it through to the end, but the killer is so anonymous (he manages to make Jason seem like a lively soul) that you can’t really cheer for him either. It might be an entirely different experience if red-and-green-filter-vision, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to find out. Without the 3D this would have been straight to DVD material. Do yourself a favor and grab a few 70s or 80s gore-fests instead.
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