‘My Bloody Valentine 3D’ is a lot of fun

By Zack McGhee | Friday, January 16, 2009, 10:10 AM

Is there a weapon better suited to 3D than the pickaxe? I couldn’t think of one as I watched the psychotic killer of My Bloody Valentine 3D tear through his victims with blunt stereoscopic force. Certainly it’s an improvement over the knife — even Friday the 13th: Part III upgraded to an axe for key 3D effects way back in 1982. But the pickaxe! With its subtle curves, multi-purpose head, and baton-shaped body, it emerges from the screen as an elegant but deadly threat.

Director Patrick Lussier started out in movies editing Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994, and he’s edited all of Craven’s films since then. You can hear him on the commentary tracks for the Scream movies, where he’s incredibly charismatic and has a knack for remembering interesting anecdotes. He made his feature directing debut with the underrated Dracula 2000, but since then has been consigned to direct-to-video work. (He continues to work as an editor, even on his own films, including this one.) My Bloody Valentine 3D is Lussier’s first “big” movie, and it borrows heavily from the conventions of horror movies, which is what we expect. We want to see a horror movie in 3D. Although it’s gory, it’s not torture porn; it uses gore to have fun with the 3D process.

As the movie begins, we learn about a tragic cave-in at a small-town Pennsylvania mine. The lone survivor, Harry Warden, hacked his friends to death with a pickaxe; then the cave-in put him in a coma. A few months later, he wakes up and goes on another rampage, killing more than a dozen people. Warden is shot and killed just before he can dispatch with teen Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), while Tom’s girlfriend, Sarah (Jamie King), and Axel Palmer (Kerr Smith) look on.

Ten years later, Warden is dead. We learn that Tom left town, and returns now only after his father’s death. Tom’s dad owned the mine, and Tom plans to sell it. In his absence, Sarah turned to Axel (now the town sheriff) for comfort, and they’ve since married and had a son. As all the would-be victims of Warden are together again, the anniversary of the Valentine’s Day massacre approaches, and the murders begin again.

Certainly My Bloody Valentine has its flaws. After Tom rolls back into town, there’s a long stretch with lots of bad dialogue and no kills. It has a few scares, but unlike the best recent horror movies, it’s practically starved of suspense. Nor does it have the wit or engaging performances of a movie like Scream. After the movie, a friend correctly remarked that Kerr Smith “couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag.” He and Jensen Ackles are engaged in an interminable brood-off from frame one, in addition to vying for the affections of the mannered, uneven Jamie King. Certainly, I must give credit to the man behind the mask (is it Rich Walters?), whose presence is always felt. But the movie’s best performance comes from the fearless (naked) Betsy Rue as Irene, whose screen time is tragically short-lived.

The RealD process — used previously for movies like Bolt, Monster House and the semi-annual re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas — is not perfect. Sometimes parts of the image seemed blurry or unstable to me, and the digital print we saw had a handful of severe artifacts; but these are not constant problems, and certainly this is an improvement over the 3D processes of the past. (Nothing has yet topped the current IMAX process, however.)

I haven’t seen the 1981 original, so I don’t know how faithful the new film is to it. (Lionsgate released a My Bloody Valentine: Special Edition DVD of the original movie, which I plan to have a look at this weekend.) And while there will be no particular reason to see the remake of My Bloody Valentine on DVD or cable, nor in a theater that is showing the flattened “2D” version — in a movie theater, with a raucous crowd, in 3D, it’s a lot of fun.

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