Spring Break
"Bloody Valentine" give movie-goers 3D fun
MCT
Issue date: 1/22/09 Section: Features
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No cartoon cuddliness in this 3D outing: It's a hand-drips-blood-in-your-lap exploitation picture that will remind anyone who has seen the original 3D fad films of those flaming arrows and other stuff that leapt off the screen at folks sitting in the dark with silly glasses.
The glasses are less silly, but "Bloody" is a generally graceless outing, lacking the subtlety or horror foreplay of the original. Editor-turned-director Patrick Lussier ("White Noise 2") treats the multi-writer script as an afterthought and jumps straight into the mayhem as he recreates the mining disaster that gave us the miner-mass murderer Harry Warden "10 years before." A brisk opening shows us the mine owner's son Tom (Jensen Ackles), whose blunder caused a cave-in; the single comatose miner rescued six days later, and the awful realization that his fellow victims didn't die of asphyxiation or the crush of earth. They were killed by a guy who didn't want them using up his oxygen, a guy who awakes from his coma and wipes out the hospital for good measure, then butchers teenagers who pay tribute to their fallen towns folk by going underground for some serious partying.
Cut to 10 years later and the town of Harmony is trying to get through one Valentine's Day without commemorating the massacre by the man in the oxygen mask.
Kids who learned to get over their yen for subterranean sex by surviving a group grope in the tunnels back in the day are now the adults running Harmony.
The jerk-jock Axel (Kerr Smith) has become sheriff. He has married the fetching Sarah (Jaime King), Tom's ex, and is cheating on her with Sarah's cashier at the family supermarket. (Megan, played by Megan Boone, reminds us that things other than pick axes leap off the screen in 3D films.) Tom returns to town to sell his daddy's mine, earning the ire of the locals (Kevin Tighe, of the mining-labor strife classic "Matewan" among them). No sooner does Tom show up than the dead Harry Warden--or an impersonator--starts pick-axing people, ripping their hearts out and sending them in heart-shaped boxes meant for Valentine's Day candy.
The plot staggers from absurd to ridiculous, and the dialogue is strictly of the "Look, we don't have to go down there" variety. But Lussier gives us a few good "gotchas." A chase through the supermarket is top-drawer tense, and a few of the fights (most of the time people just run) have nerve.
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