There is no need to make this a long review, so lets get right to it. I am a horror movie fan. I wouldn’t say I was a super crazy fan, but growing up in the age of the endless horror sequels left me with a lot of choices when it was time to rent a video. American made horror films in recent years have been on a steady decline. It has reached such a low point that the industry is now a remake factory, taking the films of Asia and Europe and redoing them in English so that teenagers won’t be inconvenienced at the theater and have to read subtitles. Now thanks to companies like Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, we can watch churned out remakes out of older horror films for the discriminating moviegoer that can’t get enough of quick edits and shaky cam.
All the rehashing made me take notice when I heard about a small film named Hatchet. After a little research I found out that it was a new take on the backwoods slasher films, ala Friday the 13th. However, rather than played with a straight face, it goes about its hacking and slashing with a tongue firmly planted in its cheek. Yes, think of it like Scream, except without the snappy dialogue and tense phone call sequences. If you’re wondering why I spent a paragraph telling you about the state of American horror, it was really just to eat up some space before I told you that the movie Hatchet sucks. It never really works out to be funny or scary. What you get from the movie is mix of flat jokes, overly juicy gore effects, and the look of a slickly produced Troma film. If you wanted to see what one of the lesser known Murray brothers is up to, or you were a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel and wanted to see the tits of the girl that played Harmony, then maybe this is for you. If you’re a fan of Saw or any film made by Eli Roth or Rob Zombie, then you’ll probably find this movie just peachy since you have awful taste in horror films anyway… there, I said it.
I’ll spend the rest of this review pushing a movie that covers much of the same ground as Hatchet, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Shot in a part mockumentary/part movie style, the story is about a group of college students making a documentary about a man that wants to show them the behinds the scenes life of a killer that comes straight out of a slasher movie. Where Hatchet falls on its face, Behind the Mask succeeds in its mixing of horror and comedy. We see the story from the eyes of a man who shows us the ins and outs of planning his legend, and his blunt openness about what he does gives off both genuine humor, and an unsettling anxiousness. I should note that the more familiar you are with the conventions of the slasher movie genre, the more you will take away from the film.