There has been somewhat of a renaissance in horror filmmaking in the past few years. Disillusioned by the doldrums of PG-13 and Japanese remake horror films, a handful of enterprising filmmakers have worked to take the genre back to its bloodiest, goriest, pretty-girl-in-a-wet-tank-top-screaming-for-help-iest roots. But like anything inventive, the initially promising works of so-called "Splat Pack" directors like Eli Roth, James Wan and Rob Zombie has become dull, uninteresting and too aware of their own aesthetic to remain worthwhile. Zombie's hasty Halloween remake was a debacle; Hostel II was the original but with babes instead of bros; and Saw, now at its fourth annual instalment, has already surpassed Jason Goes to Hell level irrelevance. Originality is overrated anyways.
Writer-director Adam Green's Hatchet takes no particular stabs at inventiveness. Proudly and fittingly publicized as "Old School American Horror," Hatchet is a film whose influences are moored in the slasher films of the late 70s and 80s. Ignoring the stylishness of the Splat Pack and sickly sweet ironic cheekiness that seems to have dominated any horror film since Scream, Green's film situates itself sincerely amongst the classics: Bob Clark's Black Christmas, Steve Miner's Friday the 13th Part II and Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street.
In keeping with its slice-and-dice predecessors, Hatchet steers clear of narrative intricacy entirely: A group of tourists (constituting a smorgasbord of dispensable social rejects) makes the moronic decision to take a haunted Louisiana swamp tour, wind up stranded and end up getting stalked and slaughtered one-by-one by a killer whose history belongs to backwater legend. It's simple, it's stupid and it's fun as hell. And that's not intended as some stale "it's so bad it's good!" sentiment. Hatchet is good. It's great. It's the sort of brutally sadistic horror film that made you love brutally sadistic horror films in the first place. Forget grimy torture chamber ambience or terse psychological horror (yawn). How about a fucking belt sander to the face? How about a sympathetic old lady getting her fat head ripped in half, Jack?
"Starring" that guy from Grandma's Boy, one of the girls from Buffy and that heavyset Wilfrid Brimley look-alike who was in Office Space, Palindromes and just about every Star Trek TV series, Hatchet may lack the box-office draw to put adequate asses in multiplex seats, but it more than compensates with plenty of spilled blood, miles of strewn intestines and equally ample amounts of charisma. And performances by Robert Englund (Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddie Krueger), Tony Todd (Candyman) and Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part VII through Jason X) as deformed backwater killer Victor Crowley make Hatchet feel as if it is truly a piece of horror genre lore, not merely a House of 1000 Corpses-style index of influences.
In keeping with the simple "stay out of the swamp" style horror, Green plays off our most primal fear: the unknown. Hatchet exists in that long-begotten horror universe where ghosts haunt the woods, people just disappear and the sober warnings of eccentric fishermen hold uncanny amounts of currency. In re-examining such standard tropes, Greene successfully avoids the thematic ostentation of his more lauded horror contemporaries. (Please Eli, Hostel is as much about Abu Ghraib as Hellraiser is about antiquing). Hatchet doesn't just evoke the slasher flicks of 20-or-so years ago, it is truly at home amongst them. And sure, these movies are dumb, probably misogynist, absolutely masochistic and almost wholly morally bankrupt in every sense of the term, but they're also a lot more fun than most of the other torture porn crap released these days. n
Hatchet
plays at Cinema du Parc (3575 Parc) every night at 9:30 p.m. until Nov. 21. Go see it. Green's latest, Spiral, is also playing for one night only: Nov. 22 at 9:30 p.m.
2008 Woodie Awards
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