Screenhead

The crew out at Chaos Squared told me, when they sent me a screener and press kit for Blood Night (available October 30th), that this would be a “throwback to eighties slasher horror“.  What they did NOT tell me, however, is that we wouldn’t see much of anything even vaguely resembling a plot for about the first ten minutes or so.

See, the first ten minutes of Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is devoted to more gore than you’ve seen recently (yeah, even Saw counts) and a series of brutalities one after the next.  We go from mass murder to rape then back to mass murder followed up with suicide by cop, and all of this in the first ten minutes.

As for the story, it’s fairly simple–our title character is locked in a psych ward after killing her parents messily in the night.  From there, she’s raped in the psych ward, loses her baby, and extracts a bloody revenge before being killed.  The local kids take this legend and run with it, calling it “Blood Night”.  But on this Blood Night, four kids are going to find themselves face to face with Mary herself…and they won’t like what they find.

I will spare a note of eye-rolling for the fact that they actually brought a Ouija board into play here, one of the oldest cliches in horror film, to really kick things off.  Come on, guys, that’s just lowbrow.

But there are a great many moments when Blood Night proves to be a pretty sweet, if somewhat straightforward, horror endeavor.  We’ve seen this before, and in this case by design.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie.  In fact, it’s actually pretty good.

If you’re into slasher horror, then you should almost certainly love Blood Night.  Sure, it’s got a tendency to be over the top, and whoever the fake blood vendor was on this project is laughing all the way to the bank, but Blood Night does pack a lot of good old fashioned thrills and a few good scares into its repetoire.  Look for a couple good performances from horror mainstays Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris, too.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a nod of respect to this shocking little throwback and hands it a respectable seven out of ten.  Yes, it’s derivative, but it’s what they do with the derivation that makes it good.  Make no mistake, Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet has chills, laughs and gore enough for three movies.

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So when I first heard about the Friday the 13th Deluxe Edition coming out, I have to admit I was more than a little skeptical of the whole thing.  Sure, I liked the Friday the 13th series just fine, especially the later episodes where Jason Voorhees is a mute, unstoppable juggernaut that only cares about chopping up kiddies even though, at this point, everyone he went to camp with the summer he died had been long since murdered or was otherwise dead.  He was basically now just killing for the thrill of it or something.  But seeing as how this is, unbelievably, the thirtieth anniversary of Friday the 13th, it’s fair to launch the re-releases.  And it’s doubly fair since the new movie’s getting its own video release soon.

But anyway, the Deluxe edition starts with—at least this is the earliest one I found—one of the biggest lies in modern filmmaking: Friday the 13th part 4, The Final Chapter.

Because as we all know, this was definitely anything but the final chapter.

This time around, Jason’s currently riding a morgue slab until, somehow, despite all logic and good common sense and completely ignoring the fact that he’d been hanging from a noose for probably around a couple hours by the time they cut him down, he’s brought back to life in a hospital morgue.  And when he gets up, he’s not hungry for a bucket of chicken or a keg of beer, no sir, not our Jason—he promptly goes on a killing spree, working his way back to Crystal Lake where he’s going to terminally separate from life everyone in the general vicinity.  But this time, Jason’s got a problem–namely, Corey Feldman.  Because as we all know, Corey Feldman is proof against virtually any horror monster ever, because who wants to spend more than twenty minutes on screen with Corey Feldman?

This may involve the biggest MacGuffin involved in killing Jason I’ve ever seen.  It was bad enough when, way back near the beginning, someone managed to convince Jason that she was his MOTHER by putting on his dead mom’s SWEATER, but this one just takes the taco.  Frankly, it just makes Jason look bad, and I’m always glad to see him come back for another try just to see if he can manage to make up for whatever idiocy did him in the last time.

Oh, sure, it’s not ALWAYS idiocy—I remember very fondly one such killing in which Jason took an outboard motor to the head, and not because someone dropped it on him, either.  It’s always somehow inspirational to watch this massive misshapen lump take damage on a positively epic scale and continue to come back for more.  He’s like a metaphor for life, Jason Voorhees, and that’s why I’m always ready for another foray with this guy.  An installation of Friday the 13th is a lot like pizza—even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good, and that’s absolutely the case here, but it’s not really that bad.  In fact, this is one of the better installments, thanks to some sweet makeup work by film legend Tom Savini and lots of the old hack-and-slash.  And the 3-D cover, alternate ending, deleted scenes and new sound options sure don’t hurt either.

As a final chapter, it wouldn’t have been half bad.  Frankly, though, I’m glad it carried on, elevating Jason from minor-league slasher to insane superhuman dreadnought.  He’s downright iconic, he is, and his adventures will live on well past their thirtieth birthday.

At least, I hope so.

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