Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
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Given that it's a slasher movie set in the unlikely environment of mining, it's appropriate that My Bloody Valentine 3D eventually collapses. Starts off pretty strong, though. You'd have to be pretty square to deny the pleasures of the newspaper-headline opening credits, the laugh-out-loud over-the-top grand guignol gore effects (which start almost right away), and of course the full-frontal nude 3D chase scene, which more than anything else is why I decided to see this movie in the theater. As a manly movie aficionado par excellence, how could I not? All that kind of stuff is what makes MBV3D the perfect manly movie in the early going--it's designed to make you crack up and cheer at the screen, ogle the sessy ladies and guffaw at the carnage.
But before long it taps that vein of trashy gold dry, and starts alternating between increasingly monotonous chase scenes and kills (which occasionally cross some weird lines--killing a pregnant girl? reserving the worst corpse desecration for the completely innocent bit-part Latina housekeeper? menacing a kid for no good reason and never following up on it?) and gritted-teeth dramatic scenes that I promise you the audience is not there to see. Folks, I've sat through enough manly movies to know which ones will end up making a roomful of drunk dudes start nodding off, and after about the first third of this movie, enter sandman. Meanwhile, the film's engaging whodunit storyline, which at first seemed like a promising crossbreeding of the silmilar elements from Scream with a straightforward, non-ironic modern slasher vibe, ends up resorting to a Jeph Loeb-style twist-cum-cheat that leaves you feeling like you wasted your time in trying to figure it out. And the less said about the sequel-whoring ending, the better. (Least scary psychopath ever?)
Finally, I suppose this goes without saying, but this movie in no way manages nor even attempts to truly frighten or horrify. I'm sure no one stumbled into My Bloody Valentine 3D expecting the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, let alone The Exorcist, but yeah, this is your basic amusement-park ride horror movie. And hey, there's a place for that! It's nothing to apologize for! Now, I may not be the target horror-fan audience for it necessarily--unless you count antecedents like Texas Chain Saw, Psycho, and Peeping Tom, which I don't think you should, or things like Scream and American Psycho that are as much satires as slashers (slashtires?), this marks a grand total of four slasher films I've ever seen; the others were Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, neither of which did I care for or find terribly frightening, and Slumber Party Massacre 2 in a Manly Movie Mamajama-mandated, and that's truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. But I'm certainly open to wall-to-wall slayfests in an action movie format, like Doomsday or Crank or Invasion U.S.A., and I've watched that montage of all the kills from Friday the 13th enough to know that I'm open to the idea of slasher flicks as a rip-roarin' good time at the movies, watching a masked killer hack his way through some naked kids and grizzled old dudes. The thing is that that's what your movie has to deliver, from start to finish, and this one didn't. Would it still be fun to watch in a big drunk group, even if it's naptime after a while? Sure. I'm sure we'd all wake up for the next flick anyway. But I'd kind of like to be kept awake the whole time.
Your review is pretty spot-on, though I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of most slashers, or even most horror movies, as being "manly", including My Bloody Valentine. I own more horror movies then all other types combined, but with few exceptions (Maximum Overdrive) they aren't the type of thing I'll watch with a large, rowdy group.
I'm glad I caught My Bloody Valentine for the same reason I kinda sorta enjoy lots of movies in my stash; despite being lacklustre as a whole, they had one or two scenes that were crazy enough to make the experience worthwhile. I think I cherish those kinds of movies more than I do entirely solid films that don't turn psychotronic, which may explain why I'm constantly at odds with most other bloggers when it comes to cinema.
I was sure this was once the topic of a Horror Roundtable, and upon checking it turns out it was the very first topic!
Saw the original when it was released during the first big slasher boom, though I can't say very much of it stuck with me. Do remember a bit where a victim's heart gets tossed into a big pot of hot dogs, though. Did they do a variation on that in the remake?
Steven: There's a couple different ways to watch horror movies in a group, I've found. One is the basic slasher/cheese mode: cheer for the kills and the tits. Another is monsters-vs.-macho-guys, like Predator of The Thing or even Aliens, which is just kind of like a monster variation on how to watch action movies in a group. Still another is watching legit horror and enjoying how badly some of your friends get freaked the fuck out: I know our group screening of Hellraiser genuinely made some people question what they knew about life, and that's fun to observe and react to as it happens, too.
Bill: This movie has more disembodied hearts than you can shake a pickax at. No hot dogs, however.
The grisly death of the housekeeper was the most explicit call-back to the original film, Sean, where a sweet old lady gets the cooked-in-a-dryer treatment. It's just as nasty in the original film. And speaking of the original, it's one of the slashers that I actually find scary and not just a fun time - the mining get-up of the killer (again, I speak of the original) is shot really well and scares the bejesus out of me every time. I had fun with the first half or so of the remake but yeah everything you cited as problematic was.
I think that's great that you have such variety in what movies your group watches, and are able to make it work. I don't get the gang together often enough to take those kind of chances. The first category you mention more often then not turns out to be mostly filler with little killer, like My Bloody Valentine. And I guess I prefer watching the third category by myself or with my girlfriend, if only because I'm less likely to freak out with a huge group around me cracking wise and I assume they feel the same. With hundreds of kickass action movies at my disposal, I tend to wuss out and go for the sure thing, like those in your second category.
And that's why I find it odd that you would view My Bloody Valentine by the standards of a group experience. It's like faulting The Descent for being a bad example of a romantic comedy.
I have to say that I really enjoyed MBV3D. In my case though, slasher films don't really scare me (it's more the horror/ghost/thriller stuff that scares the bejeezus out of me) so I go to these kind of movies like they are Michael Bay flicks. So for me, this movie did what it's supposed to; I laughed at ridiculous scenes, yelled at the characters when they were stupid and occasionally jumped at a few of the pop-out-of-the-screen moments. I also realize that I probably liked this movie a lot more than I normally would because of the 3D, which was just fun.
So I'll probably watch it again and be completely unimpressed, but for the first go around, I had a lot of fun.
Steven: I'm not sure what you're saying about me viewing MBV3D through the lens of a group experience. It's not as though if I had seen it and it turned out to be reminiscent of Cries and Whispers I would have stormed out saying "I wanted Road House!" I evaluated it as a movie. It's the kind of movie, or at least it contains the kind of material, that I've watched in a group setting, so naturally that came up in my mind as I was watching it and subsequently thinking and writing about it. But as you'll note in my review, I think that holding it to a group-movie standard is a wash--in some ways it would work great, it others it wouldn't work so well, in the end we'd enjoy it but it wouldn't stand out as a stone Manly Movie Mamajama classic. Mostly, what it comes down to is that my standards for this kind of movie apply regardless of setting: I want it to be a lot of fun from beginning to end. It was THAT that was my problem with it in the end, not some theoretical failure as a group movie.
Sam: You're right, the 3D was a blast, and i probably should have talked about that a bit more. I don't regret seeing it at all, for that very reason.
I wasn't really expressing anything but my confusion as to why you would approach the movie that way. It seemed like an interesting perspective, but I didn't understand why you chose it. Now I do.
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Comments (10)
Your review is pretty spot-on, though I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of most slashers, or even most horror movies, as being "manly", including My Bloody Valentine. I own more horror movies then all other types combined, but with few exceptions (Maximum Overdrive) they aren't the type of thing I'll watch with a large, rowdy group.
I'm glad I caught My Bloody Valentine for the same reason I kinda sorta enjoy lots of movies in my stash; despite being lacklustre as a whole, they had one or two scenes that were crazy enough to make the experience worthwhile. I think I cherish those kinds of movies more than I do entirely solid films that don't turn psychotronic, which may explain why I'm constantly at odds with most other bloggers when it comes to cinema.
I was sure this was once the topic of a Horror Roundtable, and upon checking it turns out it was the very first topic!
Posted by Steven | February 23, 2009 11:22 PM
Saw the original when it was released during the first big slasher boom, though I can't say very much of it stuck with me. Do remember a bit where a victim's heart gets tossed into a big pot of hot dogs, though. Did they do a variation on that in the remake?
Posted by Bill Sherman | February 24, 2009 8:29 AM
Steven: There's a couple different ways to watch horror movies in a group, I've found. One is the basic slasher/cheese mode: cheer for the kills and the tits. Another is monsters-vs.-macho-guys, like Predator of The Thing or even Aliens, which is just kind of like a monster variation on how to watch action movies in a group. Still another is watching legit horror and enjoying how badly some of your friends get freaked the fuck out: I know our group screening of Hellraiser genuinely made some people question what they knew about life, and that's fun to observe and react to as it happens, too.
Bill: This movie has more disembodied hearts than you can shake a pickax at. No hot dogs, however.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | February 24, 2009 10:35 AM
The grisly death of the housekeeper was the most explicit call-back to the original film, Sean, where a sweet old lady gets the cooked-in-a-dryer treatment. It's just as nasty in the original film. And speaking of the original, it's one of the slashers that I actually find scary and not just a fun time - the mining get-up of the killer (again, I speak of the original) is shot really well and scares the bejesus out of me every time. I had fun with the first half or so of the remake but yeah everything you cited as problematic was.
Posted by Jason | February 24, 2009 11:25 AM
I think that's great that you have such variety in what movies your group watches, and are able to make it work. I don't get the gang together often enough to take those kind of chances. The first category you mention more often then not turns out to be mostly filler with little killer, like My Bloody Valentine. And I guess I prefer watching the third category by myself or with my girlfriend, if only because I'm less likely to freak out with a huge group around me cracking wise and I assume they feel the same. With hundreds of kickass action movies at my disposal, I tend to wuss out and go for the sure thing, like those in your second category.
And that's why I find it odd that you would view My Bloody Valentine by the standards of a group experience. It's like faulting The Descent for being a bad example of a romantic comedy.
Posted by Steven | February 24, 2009 11:50 AM
I have to say that I really enjoyed MBV3D. In my case though, slasher films don't really scare me (it's more the horror/ghost/thriller stuff that scares the bejeezus out of me) so I go to these kind of movies like they are Michael Bay flicks. So for me, this movie did what it's supposed to; I laughed at ridiculous scenes, yelled at the characters when they were stupid and occasionally jumped at a few of the pop-out-of-the-screen moments. I also realize that I probably liked this movie a lot more than I normally would because of the 3D, which was just fun.
So I'll probably watch it again and be completely unimpressed, but for the first go around, I had a lot of fun.
Posted by Sam | February 24, 2009 1:21 PM
Jason: Ohhh. Gotcha.
Steven: I'm not sure what you're saying about me viewing MBV3D through the lens of a group experience. It's not as though if I had seen it and it turned out to be reminiscent of Cries and Whispers I would have stormed out saying "I wanted Road House!" I evaluated it as a movie. It's the kind of movie, or at least it contains the kind of material, that I've watched in a group setting, so naturally that came up in my mind as I was watching it and subsequently thinking and writing about it. But as you'll note in my review, I think that holding it to a group-movie standard is a wash--in some ways it would work great, it others it wouldn't work so well, in the end we'd enjoy it but it wouldn't stand out as a stone Manly Movie Mamajama classic. Mostly, what it comes down to is that my standards for this kind of movie apply regardless of setting: I want it to be a lot of fun from beginning to end. It was THAT that was my problem with it in the end, not some theoretical failure as a group movie.
Sam: You're right, the 3D was a blast, and i probably should have talked about that a bit more. I don't regret seeing it at all, for that very reason.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | February 24, 2009 2:30 PM
I wasn't really expressing anything but my confusion as to why you would approach the movie that way. It seemed like an interesting perspective, but I didn't understand why you chose it. Now I do.
Posted by Steven | February 24, 2009 4:12 PM
Gotcha!
Posted by Sean T. Collins | February 24, 2009 4:50 PM
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
Posted by sweaty armpits | February 9, 2010 9:55 AM