Hatchet - Review

In the post-Scream era, it's been almost as tough for horror filmmakers to create effective slasher movies as it was for Hollywood to produce convincing Westerns after Blazing Saddles. Yet just as that genre rose from the (artistic if not commercial) ashes with masterpieces from the likes of Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, and Lawrence Kasdan, the far less reputable slasher flick has been reinvigorated in the last couple of years by a group of talented fans-turned-filmmakers. Eli Roth injected satire on contemporary American foreign policy into the mix with the HostelRob Zombie fused horror conventions with those of the Western for the masterful The Devil's Rejects, and Scott Glosserman deconstructed slasher clichés with wit and irony in the self-conscious Behind the Mask. Now we have Adam Green's Hatchet, a horror movie in the tradition of Friday the 13th and all its imitators that pretends the last ten years never happened. It plays its conventions straight, an approach that keeps it from working on as many levels as Zombie and Glosserman's films, but which ultimately yields its own rewards. It won't win any converts to the genre, but for people who are already fans Hatchet delivers the goods and then some, and Green's honest passion for the form in which he's working is admirable.

Hatchet's plot is a stripped-down premise with just enough story to motivate the carnage: a group of strangers gather on a boat tour of Louisiana's haunted swamps, only to become stranded in an area allegedly occupied by the region's most notorious monster. The killer, Victor Crowley, may or may not be a ghost. The legend is that he was killed by his own father in a horrible accident, but now, alive or not, he's on a rampage in the swamps. Green supplies a cross-section of victims, from a middle-aged couple to a token black guy to a pair of beautiful soft-core porno actresses (thus justifying the film's obligatory gratuitous nudity), none of whom are particularly engaging. They're mostly a shrill lot that range from the ineffectual to the aggressively stupid, and although Green aims for humor in their scatological banter, the vulgarity is nowhere near as colorful or clever as that found in the similarly profane Superbad. For the first 45 minutes or so the irritating characters seem like a flaw—who wants to spend time with these people? It doesn't help that Green is a lot less proficient as a screenwriter than he is as a director; his ways of showing the stupidity of one of the porn stars are pretty stale, like when she asks if 911 is the number for the police (that joke was old somewhere around Jack Benny's era).

But once Victor Crowley enters the action and starts killing people off one by one in classic slasher style, Green's intentions become clear. This isn't a horror film like Halloween or Psycho that operates on suspense; it's a body count movie like the Friday the 13th sequels, in which anticipation is the key. We don't fear for these characters' lives, we wait for them to die—and we want to see them die as disgustingly as possible, both because most of them are so annoying and because it gives Hatchet a chance to exhibit its true strength, some extremely inventive and graphic special effects. The gore is by none other than John Carl Buechler, an FX veteran (and, appropriately enough, the director of one of the better Friday the 13th films) who knows his stuff. The murders here are genuinely clever and shocking, no small feat in an era when the Hostel and Saw franchises have desensitized horror fans to the point of numbness. Yet the killings are also fun; in spite of the gruesomeness, Hatchet is so abstracted from reality (as opposed to the aforementioned Hostel and Saw films) that there's nothing remotely disturbing about it. And there shouldn't be—it's a rollercoaster ride, pure and simple, and once it gets going it's a great time. Green lifts from a bunch of early '80s slasher flicks, from The Burning to Tobe Hooper's underrated The Funhouse, and his obvious affection for the genre is infectious. His enthusiasm seeps into the celluloid, so that even when the plotting is routine and the dialogue obvious, the movie has a kind of giddy energy that carries the viewer through the static spots between the set pieces. Hatchet isn't all that original, but it gets the job done as a gory campfire tale—like its villain, its brute strength makes up for its relative lack of brains.