My Bloody Valentine 3D cuts straight to the heart of things. (Pun!)

Get out your 3D specs, dudes and dudettes.  It’s about to get real slasher-y real fast. “My Bloody Valentine 3D” is a film that does not waste time on such trivial matters as fully formed characters, meaningful dialogue or really anything at all beyond suspense and stylized kill scenes.  That tunnel vision focus on spectacular violence basically makes this a throwback to the old school slasher, which is no surprise considering it’s a remake of a lofi 1981 horror movie of the same name. (Fun fact:  Quentin Tarantino called the original his favorite slasher movie of all time.)

TV Casualties Rating:

Run Time: 101 minutes

Directed by: Patrick Lussier

Written by: Todd Farmer, Zane Smith

Starring: Jensen Ackles, Jaime King, Kerr Smith

Theatrical Release: 01/16/09

DVD Release: 05/19/09

Production Budget: $15 million

Domestic Gross: $52 million

Metacritic Score: 51/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 59%

The pitch must’ve been:  “Jason Vorhees… wait for it… in a coal mine.”  The story setup appears to follow the “unstoppable psychotic killer on the loose” formula pretty faithfully.  Just replace the standard ax with a pick ax and the hockey mask with some mining gear.

We learn, through a montage of headlines, that an accident in a Pennsylvania mineshaft preceded a trapped miner, Harry Warden (Richard John Walters,) going on a killing spree to conserve oxygen in the closed shaft.  It’s a year later, and the killer has just woken from a coma.  Naturally, he has just one thing in mind:  ruining the keg party taking place in his beloved mine with two simple techniques:  slashing and bashing.  (He is delayed en route when a detour requires him to murder everyone in a hospital.)

The rest of the movie transpires 10 years later, following a group of kids that managed to survive the worst kegger ever and are now adults.  The murders start up again, and it’s a classic case of “I thought that psycho was dead!”  Is Harry Warden back?  Is someone copying his patented slash and bash techniques?  A whodunit ensues, ultimately culminating in a predictable ending that is supposed to be a surprise ending.  The plot elements honestly don’t matter, and the script wastes little time developing the characters and their relationships, so I won’t waste mine describing them.

Every shred of artistic talent here focused on creative slasher-ing, particularly mining (pun!) the 3D gimmick for sight gags, and the film delivers with style in this regard.  Anyone watching this movie for any other reason than having a pick ax come flying out of the screen at them is going to be disappointed.

Did it have some painfully bad moments?  Sure.  Could it have been better?  Absolutely.  Still, on some level I can respect that My Bloody Valentine 3D trims almost all of the fat and cuts right to core of what a slasher fan would want to see.  So yes, the story basically sucks, and the (non-surprise) ending is a major letdown.  Purely as a gimmicky 3D movie, though, this was still decent entertainment, especially if you don’t mind laughing at it here and there.

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