Review

On Valentine's Day 20 years ago, an explosion of methane gas trapped a group of miners deep underground. The supervisors, who were meant to monitor methane build up, had left early to attend the annual Valentine's Day dance. A rescue attempt manages to reach the trapped miners but only one of them is alive, Harry Warden. In a carefully understated scene it's implied that Harry has survived by resorting to cannibalism and is stark raving mad.

A year later Harry Ward exacts his revenge by killing the two supervisors who had abandoned their posts. He leaves a bloody warning never to hold another Valentine's Day dance. The town of Valentine Bluffs, apparently in Nova Scotia, has heeded Harry's warning for over 20 years but this year to hell with it, they are going to hold a dance.

After a couple of bloody warnings, "you really do lose your heart in Valentine Bluffs", the town Sheriff and Mayor call off the dance and demand that all the decorations are taken down. A group of young people decide to hold their own party, at the mine, to bloody consequences. Is Harry Warden back and up to his old games? A pretty bad movie that has some unique charms ensues.

By 1981 the writing was on the wall, probably in warm blood, that the slasher subgenre was where the horror dollar was at. There was money in those sharp instruments and every man and his dog was pumping out a cheap slasher flick hoping to cash in on the success of Carpenter's Halloween and Cunningham's Friday the 13th. Surprisingly leading the charge were Canadian filmmakers, who took to the slasher concept as quickly as Jason Voorhees took to camp counsellors. Any number of slashers started appearing from the Country and again surprisingly they showed quite some originality in the face of a quickly solidifying code of conduct on what should happen in a slasher flick. While U.S. filmmakers were basically pumping out the same movie again and again, their Canadian counterparts were experimenting with the boundaries and mythology of slasherdom to often time good results. My Bloody Valentine is one such movie that kind of gets overlooked when people discuss 1980s horror.

Hey another slasher that Carol J. Clover forgot when arriving at her pre-ordained conclusion.

Writer John Beaird dispenses with the normal rich college kids and sets the movie squarely in a working class mining town. These people aren't the best looking folk in the world but for sure they appear as the genuine blue collar article. We are introduced to our leads following a day's hard yakka down the mine digging up coal. They are covered in crap, the environment they live in is primitive, and all they seem to do is work and drink beer. Similarly the gals, besides the two main ones, aren't exactly beauty pageant entries. In simple terms the film presents us with a real world, not the artifice of the modern Hollywood slasher lite.

In yet another example of how academic Carol J. Clover ("Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film") provided false evidence to justify her socio-political viewpoint, we have an early slasher movie sans a "final girl". Actually the whole concept of the "final girl" is another example of how amateur horror writers will simply pick up on something someone else has stated with the reality being a moot point. But I digress; feel free to argue this point on the forums. What I'm trying to state here is that there is no point in trying to work out who is going to be the "final girl" as we don't really have the heroine handing the villain his arse at the back end of the movie.

Director Mihalka is adequate here; he clearly doesn't have a huge budget, and makes good use of his bleak sets and the claustrophobic nature of his underground locations. Unfortunately Mihalka is unable to maintain tension, a couple of scenes will have you worried, and that opening one was a shocker though you could see the pointy end of the result coming at you, and is off pacing-wise. There are a few scenes that could have ended up on the cutting room floor without being missed, and more work needed to be done on actually making our antagonist slightly intimidating. Sorry, some dude charging around in mining gear with a pick axe didn't do it for me, maybe a tad of the supernatural powers needed to be added to get something happening there.

As you would expect with a slasher, the kills come regularly to keep everything interesting. Looks like the censors got involved there as a lot of the deaths happen off screen and in cutaways, not the best way to run a movie in this particular subgenre. Gorehounds won't be overly enthused with My Bloody Valentine, but those wanting to walk on the wild side without getting smeared in claret should be happy enough.

The whole resolution and reason for the current batch of murders is twee and has been hacked on to provide a motive for an unlikely character to be exposed as our new Harry Warden. Big disappointment to be honest after sitting through an hour or so of unrelenting mediocrity.

Paul Kelman (TJ) simply can't act and hits his lines like he considers each and every one of them to be Shakespeare. Dude, it's a slasher and what was with the open shirt and bandana? Lori Hallier (Sarah) is clearly trying for a career as a scream queen and ends up being annoying as she slobbers her way through her role. Neil Affleck (Axel) is there or thereabouts in a badly written role. Keith Knight (Hollis) irritated me for no apparent reason, think it was the mo. And Alf Humphreys (Howard) needed to die a whole lot sooner than he did.

A Canadian horror movie without T&A, whatever is the world coming to? Guys get the odd bra shot and that's all she wrote. Gals get a shower scene, you might need to look away for that one.

Well, I didn't hear a track about someone's girlfriend leaving them and taking the pickup truck but it must have been a close thing. Paul Zaza provided a country and western score and it really isn't working.

While not in any way remotely being a good movie, My Bloody Valentine does have its charms. As opposed to the current crop of encounter group influenced slashers coming out of Boredwood, MBV is set in the real world with real people. Okay, you won't give a damn about any of them but it's still refreshing. When did horror become so plastic and regurgitated anyway? I sort of amused myself during the film trying to figure out who the miner from hell was but only picked it in the final twenty minutes or so, which may have been due to some lapses in anything approaching plausibility by the filmmakers. Not sure if I had a good time or not but it was one of those movies I had on my "must see" list so whatever.

In 2001, director George Mihalka approached Paramount with the idea for a sequel which was turned down due to abysmal cinema results for MBV. Naturally this hasn't stopped the Studio from doing a remake, which surprisingly is even worse than the original and is the definition of "plastic". For those watching closely, yes there is a Friday the 13th in the movie winking at the audience.

One for slasher fans only, and then only if you simply want to complete your 1980s trip through the past darkly. It's a bad movie with lacklustre acting and a script that will have you shaking your head. Don't make this one your special Valentine, you'll only regret it.