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. 

Hatchet 2

I really liked the first Hatchet. I feel that bears repeating. So I was excited when I heard that they had made a sequel. I know horror movie sequels can often be a pissweak endeavour, but I figured that something that offered dumb, gory fun like the original Hatchet could spawn something even better if they went bigger and more ridiculous with it. It also helped that it was being made by the same director, Adam Green. It all sounded like it was going to be a massive fun time, but unfortunately Hatchet 2 is a massive disappointment.

I don’t like Hatchet 2 and the reason is simple - Hatchet 2 just isn’t fun overall. The silliness and knowing humour of the first movie are both pretty much completely gone as the sequel tries to outdo it in terms of gore and nastiness, and tries to go serious with it. There’s still some occasional humour and some characters are thrown in as comic relief, but it feels out of place with the more serious tone the movie seems to be going for. The gore and kills are pretty awesome, but it’s a nastier, uglier movie than the first, lacking the humorous charm of the original. It almost feels as though it was made by an entirely different person. The shots are closer, there’s more shakycam and it’s pretty uninspired in terms of mood and lighting, at least compared to the original’s often hokey charms. As to why this happened, I feel it’d be due to director Adam Green having a substantial change in priorities and preferences in the years since the original, stretching out even to his filmmaking style. Hatchet 2 has a more claustrophobic feel, with a lot of close ups and most locations feeling small or narrow.

The first and most noticeable change is that they replaced Marybeth’s actress with Danielle Harris, a D-class horror film actress who, despite appearing in a lot of horror movies over the last few decades, really sucks at the whole ‘acting’ thing. She’s a total bore here. More than that, she’s a funpire – she actively sucks the fun out of the movie with every scene she’s in. Being bitchy and generically ‘tough’ (swearing a lot and threatening everybody does not make for good characterisation, dialing the redneck aspect of the character up to a ridiculous degree) she plays the film ‘seriously’, and a noticeable change to the Marybeth from the original film. She also has one eyebrow raised through the entire film, making her look constantly surprised (that’s largely just Harris’ look in general though). Marybeth is too serious and brooding and whiny here and it really hurts the movie, especially since she’s the focus of it. She’s also become far less capable, spending her time being mostly useless and just screaming when shit gets real. I know it’s weird to put so much focus so early in this review on a single issue as simple as a recasting, but honestly it’s one of the film’s biggest issues for me. She’s just so awful that she sours the entire movie.

Taking place immediately at the end of the original Hatchet, Marybeth (Danielle Harris) narrowly escapes from Victor Crowley’s clutches, makes it out of the swamp and heads back to town. She immediately seeks out Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd), to learn more about Victor and how to stop him, and together they form a posse of hunters to go back into the swamp to try and kill Crowley for good. Marybeth is hoping to retrieve the bodies of her father and brother to give them a proper burial, and her uncle comes along to make sure she’s ok. But Reverend Zombie has his own plans – he believes that Victor Crowley’s spirit can only be sated if he gets revenge by killing those responsible for his death and he’s lured them into the hunting party for that purpose.

So basically it’s an excuse to have another bunch of characters head into the swamp to get killed off one by one, something that feels especially hollow considering the original’s charm. The overall far more serious tone is what hurts it the most I feel, since the scenes when people aren’t getting hacked up by Crowley are so long and interminably dull. Seeing Marybeth argue with her uncle about going into the swamp for five minutes is so dull I just feel like fast forwarding through it. It’s not even a long movie, coming in at about seventy or so minutes, but boy hell does it feel long and drawn out in those first forty minutes.

Speaking of which, the first forty minutes of the movie, barring some small callback cameos to the original and a pretty fun/gross pre-title kill, are a total freaking borefest made up of characters spouting exposition and Marybeth complaining. And this is the biggest problem with the movie: Marybeth is not an interesting or likeable character. She wasn’t interesting in the first film, and she isn’t here so focusing on her was a big mistake. In the first one her character’s lack of character wasn’t too much of an issue because she wasn’t the focus and everybody else was a ridiculous caricature. She wasn’t the lynchpin holding the movie together despite her final girl status, so she never brought it down. In this one however she’s the focus of attention and just constantly brings everything down with how endlessly serious she is. They want her struggle and issues to carry weight, and they really, really don’t, so she just comes across as annoying and whiny. She’s also an idiot to boot this time around. In the first film her trepidation made sense – she was wary of the legend of Crowley, but wanted to find her missing family so she braved it anyway, not entirely aware of what she was facing. This time she knows exactly what the danger is, and yet she comes across as dumber, more naive and less capable than she was before. And holy hell is she whiny. I feel the need to bring this up yet again, since she spends so much of the film endlessly complaining.

Once they get to the swamp and things actually start happening it improves, but it also devolves a bit and becomes a loose collection of gory kills. The hunting party instantly splits up for no reason as the various side characters go about their own little agendas. That at least is a nice little excuse for why they’d otherwise pointlessly split up (two guys want to hunt alligators for cash, which calls back to the gator hunting mentioned in the first film), and the Reverend’s ulterior motives explains why he never tries to stop them. Otherwise with everybody split up and getting killed individually it breaks the pace of the movie in a weird way, especially since the characters are all completely unaware of what happened to each other and never get mentioned - they don’t even try to stick together or check on each other, they just wander around aimlessly getting hacked apart.

This is where the film tries to bring in some humour with its side characters, but it’s pretty weird. We get a collection of hillbillies and assorted hunters, none of whom are particularly memorable. There is the one black guy who sings a song I assume to be titled ‘Chicken and Biscuits and Gravy’, since those are the sole words repeated ad infimum. He hits on Marybeth and is a goofball, and that’s his entire character. There are a few hillbillies who just talk about being hillbilliesm and also a really out of place pairing between a hunter and his almost stalker-ish ex-girlfriend who comes with him on the dangerous murder hunt so she can seduce him. They’re a weird mob, but you won’t really care or remember them. Tony Todd is good as Reverend Zombie, though it is weird to see what was a cameo role being expanded into a main character, though a secretly villainous one. His voice is still amazing, the sort of deep, evil voice that you’d expect a Disney villain to have, but the humour is gone now. In a weird little bit of casting, the guy who played hapless tour guide Shaun in the first film comes back to play Shaun’s brother Justin, which is a bit weird. Even he lacks the humour he had in the first film.

We get an updated backstory to Victor Crowley and his curse, which is a bit weird. Attempts at changing horror villain’s backstories and origins have a history of never working out too well in anything really, and there wasn’t anything wrong with his story in the first place. The additions here also don’t really change anything, other than giving an unneeded explanation to something that wasn’t particularly important. Victor’s father, Thomas Crowley, had a sick and ailing wife. He got a live-in nurse to look after her, and ended up falling in love with her and having an affair. His dying wife found out and lay down a voodoo curse on them both before dying. Some nine months later and the nurse gave birth to the disfigured Victor, the sight of which made her die of shock. It’s a pretty benign addition actually, and does very little other than explaining Victor’s appearance and apparent immortality as being due to voodoo.

Reverend Zombie thinks that Victor Crowley will only leave once his vengeful spirit has been appeased by killing off those who had wronged him – the teenagers who had burnt down his shack and indirectly caused his death. In the decades since they’ve grown into men and they’re exactly the same men Zombie invites to join the posse. In another retcon, Marybeth’s dead dad (Freddy Kreuger’s short cameo from the first film) is also one of those grown teens, purposelessly linking Marybeth to Victor. A lot of horror movies tend to do this, since linking characters is an easy way to make a dull, uninteresting character important in some way. In this case it gives an excuse as to why we’re still being subjected to Marybeth, when she could have just as easily been replaced by anybody. Reverend Zombie explicitly says at the beginning that Victor Crowley is a ghost (he calls him a ‘repeater’ as he constantly relives the night he was killed), and as such can’t be killed in conventional methods, but Marybeth sort of ignores him completely to try and shoot him to death, even though that didn’t work in the first film.

Crowley himself has undergone something of an apparent redesign, most noticeable in his face, which is larger and more leathery this time around. He even looks bigger and more hulking this time through. Kane Hodder does another great job in making Crowley exactly the sort of monster man you’d never want to be caught by. So while a lot of the other changes have been disappointing, Victor Crowley as a character is still a lot of fun and really deserved a better sequel. The film’s saving grace is the gory kills, which are brutal, gross, often creative and pretty funny. The opener sets the bar – a hillbilly is strangled with his own intestines until his head pops off – and from there the goriness continues. Faces are caved in with hatchets, heads are torn open by propellers and a massive chainsaw is used to slice through some guys groin-first. There is a lot of blood and gore thrown around, and it’s pretty cool, though some effects do look cheap. Overall though, these are some pretty awesome kills.

The ending here is one I like. It has the exact same sudden abruptness as the first film’s ending, but it’s the reverse situation. It has an air of finality about it, far better than the first film’s sudden stop, and at least ends the movie with a bang. The journey there is sadly mostly a frustrating test of patience, especially through the dull first half, but those kills and that ending at least bring it over the line. Oddly enough, despite how apparently final this ending is, yet another Hatchet sequel was made a few years later.

Hatchet

 

These days horror movies seem to be almost exclusively serious business. They’re about allegories and tension and suspense and atmosphere, which are all fine and dandy, and often lead to expertly creepy and disturbing gems, but it also means most are overly grim and serious. The dumb, simple fun of the past, where mask-clad serial killers slaughter nude teens ridiculously gorily and that’s it, is largely gone and mostly relegated to low budget indie fare that doesn’t review well. I guess that was the way back in the seventies, eighties and nineties as well, but at least back then there was a lot more of it. While I do appreciate the more serious, genuinely creepy and frightening horror genre, the movies I go back to and love the most are the dumb, gory fun ones.

Hatchet fills my itch for something dumb, gory and fun. It feels weird saying that, since Hatchet actually released ten years ago in 2006, and in the decade since has spawned two sequels. But in the time since then there really hasn’t been much like it. It’s a gory, late 80s/early 90s style slasher film that recognises what makes those films fun. It’s not meta or self-aware, it doesn’t try to reinvent or disassemble tropes or conventions and it never pretends to be above its own genre. Hatchet is an earnest slasher flick boasting ridiculous gore, a horrendous mountain man killer and humour to have fun with its ridiculous characters. It warmly embraces the slasher genre, knowing the silly conventions and gleefully throwing its characters into it all the same. It’s got its faults, and I’m sure a lot of what I consider positives will be considered negatives for a lot of other people, but I really enjoyed it.

It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which means drunk, wasted partygoers have flocked to the streets. Tired of all the drinking and topless girls, recently dumped Ben convinces his best friend Marcus to give up the boobs and booze for a while and go with him on a late night ‘haunted swamp tour’. Despite the seedy, amateurish nature of the boat tour operation, and the various warnings from creepy locals not to go into the swamp at night, Ben, Marcus and a ragtag group of tour-goers, including an amateur porno director, two bickering ‘actresses’, a wholesome older married couple and Marybeth, a standoffish local girl, head off into the swamp, led by hopeless but enthusiastic tour guide Shaun. The tour itself is a bust when the clueless Shaun ends up getting them lost and sinking the boat, leaving them stranded in the swamp. But it’s no ordinary swamp, as local girl Marybeth reveals - it’s the swamp of the dreaded Victor Crowley.

A bayou legend, Victor was born a horribly disfigured child kept hidden away by his father who looked after him in a shack in the swamp. One day local teenagers set fire to the shack, trapping Victor inside. In an effort to break into the house and rescue his son, Victor’s father accidentally struck him in the face with a hatchet, killing him. Decades have passed, but the legend has it that Victor’s vengeful spirit remains in the swamp, searching for his father and bringing death to anybody that comes in his way. Since then, people have gone missing in the swamp for years, including Marybeth’s gator-hunting father and brother, whom she is searching for. It isn’t long before the hapless group come across Victor’s cabin and find themselves on the run from the massive monster man.

 

The cast is made up of people you’ll vaguely recognise from various B-grade movies and TV shows, but I don’t mean this in wholly negative way. They’re all cast perfectly, fitting expertly into their silly roles and giving it their all. Nobody is slumming it here and the acting, as over the top as it tends to be in some cases, fits the comedic vibe well. The only potential low point by necessity is Marybeth, the only character played straight and without humour. She’s there to be the competent one, to act as an exposition dump and fill the ‘final girl’ role. Of the rest, Ben is perhaps the most recognisable, being played by Joel David Moore, the lanky nerd from Dodgeball and Avatar – he’s great here. Outside of the main cast, there are a couple of cool little cameos. Robert Englund (Freddy Kreuger) and Tony Todd (Candyman) show up in little scenes, while Kane Hodder (the iconic version of Jason Voorhees) plays both Victor Crowley and Victor’s father. He does a great job in both roles, especially as the monstrous Victor. He’s under a lot of heavy make-up, but the sheer bulk of the guy and his frantic, feral body language.

Victor Crowley himself is a fun character of the old style slasher movies. Big, ugly, super strong and seemingly unstoppable, Victor is exactly the sort of freaky monster man that makes this sort of movie. He’s got a great appearance as well, the malformed, inhuman face, bulbous head and general thickness. The fact that he’s dressed in hillbilly clothes (he’s got freaking overalls on) elevates the silliness. The backstory is pretty decent for a horror villain, and being placed in a New Orleans swampland bayou gives things a slightly different flavour all around. I just really like the idea that Crowley instantly flips out and kills anything he comes across in some sort of crazed, animalistic fury for no discernible reason. A lot of horror movies like to try and make their villain iconic or memorable, or tag them as the ‘next’ something something, but I have to say I just really dig Victor Crowley’s gruesome simplicity. The look, the violence, the backstory all work for me.

The film never takes itself seriously, fully acknowledging how ridiculous the premise itself is and just has fun with it. The gore is fun and explosive, with ridiculous, creative kills. The opening kill sets the tone, as a hapless schlub suffers a mini montage of dismemberment from Victor, ending with his spinal column being torn out. The other deaths are just as brutal as Victor comes at his victims with a variety of deadly tools, the titular hatchet and, often even more brutal, his own fists. We have belt sanders hitting faces, bodies being impaled on poles, heads being twisted around and other gruesome, gory and funny stuff. I think the best kill might be to the poor, nice older married lady who has her head ripped in half horizontally, leaving her tongue flapping wildly. The gore effects are all practical awesomeness, the sort of gooey, fleshy nonsense with geysers of fake blood that makes the gore fun.

After the gory opening, it takes about forty minutes of set-up before the cast are on the run from Victor, but I enjoyed it. I don’t know why, but compared to a lot of other films I just had fun with the characters and the writing, and the change from the boozy streets of New Orleans Mardi Gras to the swamp at night gives a bit of a different atmosphere, but the film’s overall aesthetic is more in line with cheesy B horror, with creepy mist and eerie haunted house lighting. It’s almost got the feel of a particularly goofy, gory Scooby Doo episode. It has a lot of that feel, barring the somewhat jarring heavy metal music that runs over the opening and ending credits. The movie was directed by relative unknown (and still pretty much unknown outside of horror circles) Adam Green, who has made a variety of other horror movies in the time since then. As far as I can tell it was his debut feature film, and it‘s pretty impressively done.

 

The film’s ending sadly sucks though, more in execution than conception. It suddenly cuts to black mid-action during a final scare and the credits run, a sudden, jerky transition that initially had me thinking my DVD had screwed up. I understand the idea behind the ending and conceptually I actually like it, but the execution is so abrupt and flavourless it took me a while to process it. I think the fact that the sound cuts out and it turns black for a few seconds before the credits run is what makes it difficult – it’d work far better if it ended on a freeze frame with the sound still running and then having the credits start running immediately. Still the journey there is a lot of fun.

When I’m in the mood for a fun little time, Hatchet is one of my go-to movies. It’s simple, gory fun that delivers on the violence and is fun and silly enough to keep it light and entertaining throughout. It’s something of a rough gem, and a good little time if you’re in the mood for a nonsense slasher movie.