Hatchet

December 23, 2007

Rated: Unrated Runtime: 84 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Hatchet is executed so damn well I wish I could give it a sixth star. Writer/Director Adam Green is a fan of old school slasher flicks (Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc) and has an appropriate distaste for the new wave of PG-13 horror movies. For his take on the genre he stayed true to his passion and made a movie with absolutely zero CGI, buckets and buckets of blood, and more boobies than you can shake a neck-full of beads at.

The movie starts off with a father and son gator hunting in the swamplands near New Orleans, but while there are alligators in the area they aren’t what’s really dangerous. After this duo is dispatched, we switch over to young ladies who like to show their boobs for beads, gotta love Mardi Gras. Here we meet Ben (Joel Moore) and Marcus (Deon Richmond) who are in New Orleans to enjoy the nightlife and the lovely sites. Well, Marcus is, Ben is trying to get over his recent breakup with his longtime girlfriend. Even the site of many many topless babes can’t cheer Ben up, so he decides to break from the group and go on a haunted swamp tour instead. Being the good friend, Marcus goes with him while complaining the entire time (as he should!)

They finally find a tour operator to take them into the swamp (along with a Canadian couple, a lone babe with her own reasons for going, and a porn producer with a couple hotties, one of which plays the part of the dumb blond to perfection) where things obviously don’t go as planned. The boat goes into a closed part of the swamp, wrecks, and our cast has to walk out of the swamp while being pursued by Victor Crowley.. the ghost(?) of a deformed child who was accidentally killed by his father, but still managed to grow up to terrorize people who get near his home. The movie tries to explain this, but there’s really no reason to, just go with the fact that Crowley is big, strong, deformed and apparently impossible to kill. Perfect!

The members of the tour get picked off quickly, and in very inventive ways. These are some of the best slasher death scenes I’ve seen in the last decade. Everything from getting split like a side of beef, to getting your head pulled apart.. it’s fantastic! What makes it so much fun is that it’s obviously done using latex effects and good camera work, no computers were harmed in the making of this movie. I’ve already mentioned they used buckets of blood, sometimes you could even tell they were throwing blood on a tree with a bucket, heh. That’s not a complaint at all, it added to the humor/horror effect that the movie was after and put a huge smile on my face.

One surprise was how good the acting was. The comic timing was dead on, and when they were supposed to be scared it came off as if they really were. A look at the bonus features on the DVD gave the answer to how that was done, Adam didn’t let the actors see what Crowley looked like until he jumped out at them while shooting, so the startled reaction he got was quite real. Brilliant!

Hatchet struck just the right chord with me, the attention to lighting (how is it that the swamp is so well lit at night?), the excuse to get girls naked (Mardi Gras, porn), the amusing older couple (Canadians, eh?) to the unstoppable Victor Crowley.. it’s awesome movie making, and worth every star I can possibly give it.

Posted by John | Filed Under 5 Stars, DVD, Deon Richmond, Horror, Joel David Moore, Kane Hodder, Mercedes McNab, Tamara Feldman, Unrated