Dir. Adam Green, US, 2007, 85 mins
Cast: Joel Moore, Deon Richmond, Tamara Feldman, Mercedes McNab, Kane Hodder
Review by Matthew Rodgers
The poster campaign would have you believe that Hatchet is “the next big thing” in the horror genre, and features amongst a cast of silicone enhanced beauties and non-identifiable axe fodder such iconic figures as Robert Englund aka Freedy Krueger, Tony Todd aka Candyman, Joshua Leonard aka one of the guys chased around the woods by The Blair Witch, and Kane Hodder aka Leatherface. So why is Adam Green’s homage to the glory days of gore a lamentable bore? (Now that’s a horrific sentence!)
For what its worth, the plot focuses on a group of tourists – the most notable being Ben (Moore) and his frat house buddy Marcus (Richmond) – who take a voodoo river boat ride straight through a backwater swamp in the middle of the night, casting asunder “101 ways to avoid death in a Z-List horror movie” and forgetting that the post-modern horror movement ever happened they are subsequently picked off by a character who would make The Elephant Man calendar a best seller by comparison.
It’s hard to critique a film that is attempting to sell itself as “so bad it,s good” but Hatchet is so tongue in cheek that it has burst through the side of its own face. The stilted acting doesn’t seem forced; they really are a bunch of talentless performers who are either having a great time making a piece of trashy horror or have been genuinely convinced that they are part of something special.
The low targets that Green sets himself – to make a “splatterfest” that would make Camp Crystal Lake proud – are undone by some amateur filmmaking techniques. One of the singular reasons behind watching an exploitive gore movie such as this is the voyeuristic deaths suffered by the characters; look at the success of the first Hostel movie. Here, Hatchet's assorted decapitations and disembowelments, however inventive, are cloaked in poorly lit darkness and the cameras linger on them so much so that they lose their effectiveness.
The horror genre is one of the most difficult to master simply because the audience’s receptiveness to the films is constantly changing. If you’ve seen one cat jump out of a cupboard, you’ve seen ‘em all. Prime example is the aforementioned Eli Roth franchise which had died a death by the second installment, Friday night revelers already bored by the “torture-porn” seeking alternative ways to be scared. The answer is not to rewind 20 years in an attempt to find an appreciative audience who could just as easily put Halloween or Friday the 13th into the DVD player.
Little more than an average episode of Scooby Doo but with more T&A and half the excitement, Hatchet gets marks for misplaced enthusiasm towards a genre Green clearly loves, but this should have been confined to the lower reaches of the rental store shelves alongside Cheerleader Massacre where upon discovery this review wouldn’t have been half as harsh.
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