Hatchet 3

Hatchet 3 sucks. It has an absolutely massive amount of gore (varying wildly in quality) and dozens of kills but, again, it lacks the heart, soul and fun of the original. It’s also has almost no plot and the thinnest reason to exist of them all. Adam Green no longer directs, instead producing (though he does cameo once again as a drunk, a role he also played in the first two films). His absence behind the camera is obvious, as this movie feels amateurish and much looser. The film work itself is obviously cheap and nasty, with ugly sets, poor acting and a total lack of style or atmosphere. The gore effects also look really cheap, and not in a particularly endearing way. If anything, it has the look and feel of an amateur fan film based around Hatchet, rather than a proper continuation.

 

Starting immediately at the end of Hatchet 2, sole survivor Marybeth has seemingly killed Victor Crowley, only for him to suddenly revive, establishing that he can’t be killed by conventional methods - within the swamp he’ll always resurrect.  On arrival back in town covered in blood after managing another escape, she’s quickly arrested by the cops who blame her for the massacre of the tour group from the first film and the hunting posse from the second film. While the police interrogate her, a group of paramedics are sent to the swamp to look for any survivors, only to get slaughtered themselves, but not before putting out a distress signal.

While a massive group of armed police and FBI Special Forces agents go into the swamp on a search/destroy rescue mission, Marybeth finds herself behind bars and being grilled by local journalist and self-appointed Victor Crowley expert Amanda. Amanda has a plan to finally end Victor forever by bringing him what he wants most – his father – and she needs Marybeth’s help to do it.

Danielle Harris continues to showcase why she’s never seen mainstream success. She’s just horrible, and her Marybeth is still so thoroughly unlikeable it’s insane. I didn’t think it was possible for her to get worse than she was in Hatchet 2, but somehow she manages it. She’s bitchier now than ever before, but just as whiny. Thankfully she’s sidelined for about half of the film. Seriously, she’s absent for the vast majority of the movie’s action, sent on a useless errand while the bulk of the action and killing takes place elsewhere.

 

Amanda is played by Caroline Williams, probably best known for starring in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (original, not remake and I hate how horror movies have gotten to the point where I have to mention whether a horror movie sequel is a remake or not). She gives actual energy to her character, something that is missing from everybody else in the movie. Speaking of, with only three exceptions the film seems to be made up entirely of random, forgettable actors, almost all of them amateurish and seemingly taken in off the street. Of the three, one is the same guy who played Justin and Shaun (acting as a third brother I guess, though it’s never mentioned), and another is the actor who played Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13^th remake, which seems done in a weird way to have two actors who played the iconic masked killer in the same film.

There’s an extended cameo by Sid Haig that makes up a fair amount of the weak side-plot. Sid Haig, like many old horror stars ready for cameos, can be terrible if you don’t know how to use him for something fun or interesting (something only Rob Zombie seems to know how to do). Here he just riffs off his Captain Spaulding performance from House of 1000 Corpses, being loudmouthed and racist. It’s almost as though the director saw that movie and said to him ‘just do that’. He feels so out of place here, but then again I can’t say the film has a particularly solid feel otherwise. It’s like a patchwork of disparate, amateurish parts shoved together, unsure of what its own tone should be.

The vast majority of the film then has you watching characters that are so forgettable and unrealised that they lack names wander through a forest until Victor appears and massacres them. The action is almost non-stop, and Victor kills a huge number of people, but it never really elevates above ‘meh’. I think since they’re mostly so disposable, and we don’t know anything about these random people that seeing them get hacked apart or ripped open doesn’t mean anything. The kills are brutal but less inventive and elaborate than what was in the first two films. Still, if you just want to watch a slaughter fest then it works well enough. It’s especially laughable when the movie takes a handful of digs at Hatchet 2’s plot, which was also thin and lacking in logic, but Hatchet 3 feels worse because the plot is nothing. Amanda and Marybeth’s quest has them drive to an old guy’s house for half the movie, while the meantime is spent with random extras getting killed until the two can get back to the swamp. The movie literally kills time by killing people.

 

Hatchet 2 established pretty well that Victor Crowley, burly physical presence aside, was a ghost. So watching a bunch of idiots try to kill him is sort of a null point, since we already know he can’t die conventionally, so all the guns and rockets shot at him aren’t going to work. The way they ultimately do kill Victor is actually pretty solid and works well in the makings of his origin from the original movie. Victor is undead, constantly searching for his father. To finally put him to rest, he needs to be given his father, his cremated remains conveniently being held by a racist old coot in the boonies. Once Victor is given his father’s ashes by Marybeth, his body suddenly decomposes, skin and muscle sloughing off until he’s reduced to a gnarled skeleton. Marybeth, bleeding out and wielding a shotgun, blasts his remains into nothingness. It’s a good ending to a disappointing movie, though it’s basically the same ending Hatchet 2 had.

And that’s the end of the Hatchet trilogy. Three films over about eight years, and only one of them is good. The rest sort of show the sad progression most horror series go through – the awesome first film, the second one that goes too serious or changes what people liked in the first one, and the cynically/lazily made sequels from that point on. The first Hatchet was a really fun time, and not so much a breath of fresh air, but a nostalgic one – it took horror movies back to the fun, gory little entertainers that we don’t get too often anymore. But with each sequel it became something far less interesting, slowly becoming the sort of garbage the original was initially an alternative to. I still wholeheartedly recommend the first film, which I still count as a fantastic movie. The second is disappointing, offering some cool kills and not much else, and 3 is just a bad movie altogether, despite its high body count. While I like the character of Victor Crowley, I do hope that this is the end for him, since the way these sequels have been spiralling downwards hasn’t been a good thing.