During that era of horror remakes that flooded the genre throughout the 2000s, one thing became abundantly clear, no matter how good each attempt actually ended up being, there sometimes was a sense that they all had the same, interchangeable tone while the originals were loaded with way more character. That didn’t stop the floodgates from opening and for the better part of a decade, every horror flick with a recognizable name managed to score some sort of redux or another and in 2009, it was the turn of Harry Warden.
“Who the fuck is Harry Warden?” I hear some of you cry (which succinctly proves my point), but those on the know knew that the arrival of a My Bloody Valentine redux meant that the remake fad had hit critical mass. It not that the original 1980s, miner-on-a-rampage, slasher was unworthy of a redo – it’s actually a solidly decent slasher for it’s time – but surely the powers that be were scraping the bottom of the barrel with a rusty pickaxe with this one.
Enter editor turned director Patrick Lussier and horror focused screenwriter Todd Farmer who, along with an impressively unsubtle use of the third dimension, hoped to prove a sceptical horror community wrong.
The Hanniger mine has had no shortage of issues over the last decade or so. Firstly, on Valentine’s Day 1997, Tom Hanniger, the son of the mine’s ower, neglected to vent the methane lines that caused a cave in that buried a clutch of men alive. However, once they were dug out, it was revealed that one of their number, the hulking Harry Warden, had murdered everyone else trapped with him in order to conserve his oxygen and then had conveniently fallen into a coma.
Zip ahead exactly a year and Harry awakens to embark on another killing spree, returning to the mine and burying his pickaxe into every partying teen he can find as they celebrate Valentine’s only to be vanquished by the local police. The only survivors are Tom, now rendered an outcast thanks to his earlier negligence, his girlfriend Sarah and her friends Axel and Irene and as a mortally wounded Harry retreats back into the bowels of the mine, the town of Harmony breathes a long overdue sigh of relief.
However, history in slasher movies rarely stay buried and exactly ten years later, Tom Hanniger returns after a long absence to find that while some things have changed (Axel is now the police chief and has a child with his now wife, Sarah), other things haven’t altered a bit and before you can say Valantine’s Day themed killing spree, a marauding killer dressed in Harry Warden’s old mining gear is parading around town, removing the hearts of his victims and leaving them in boxes of chocolates for the cops to find.
Axel, who’s never been a big fan of Tom, immediately suspects the town outcast, but Axel isn’t exactly a saint himself as he’s having an affair with one of Sarah’s workmates – so is big bad Harry still alive and continuing his messy rampage from beyond the grave, or is something far freakier at play here?
In a weird twist of fate, My Bloody Valentine 3D was released into something of an impromptu slasher showdown when it arrived in cinema’s alarmingly close to the Friday The 13th remake. What made matters even stranger is that not only were the two movies remakes of classic 80s slashers that were heavily reliant on specific dates on the calendar and saw masked murderers stalking attractive youths, but both each featured one of the leading men from hit horror show, Supernatural. While Jarad Padalecki squared off with Jason Voorhees (the natural favorite), his onscreen brother, Jensen Ackles, was left with the underdog that was My Bloody Valentine; but in a suprising turn of events, while Jason’s 2009 facelift was the more polished of the two, My Bloody Valentine proved to be far more memorable primarily because Lussier and Farmer chose to go for fucking broke.
Seemingly realising that no one would be particularly reverential to the 80s exploits of Harry Warden, the filmmakers crammed as many outlandish set pieces and excessive gore into their movie as they could while simultaneously ramping up a ridiculous whodunit plot and topping everything off with countless, crowdpleasing uses of 3D that were as subtle as a pickaxe route canal. The result may have been overwhelmingly stupid, but by the time you’re past the second time skip, you kind of accept that outrageous and silly is what Lussier and Farmer were shooting for.
The actual mystery plot and characters seem to have been born of the unholy unison of a deliberately sleazy 80s slasher and the kind of melodramatic, twenty-something angst you’d get from a teen-centric soap like the OC or One Tree Hill that sees everyone cope with with emotional problems by pouting enigmatically while their hair and makeup continues to be perfect – even when someone is trying to kill them. The reason for this isn’t hard to discern as Lussier has a sizable track record with photogenic people getting chased with sharp objects thanks to him editing the first three Scream films and Halloween H20 and he transfers all that experience here and then some in the hugely fun and gleefully nasty murders.
In fact, an early moment that sees the killer attack a horny truck driver, a hotel owning dwarf and a woman who is completely naked for the entirety of the scene crams more bizarre incident, gore and gratuitous nudity into a single sequence than most slashers manage in their entire run time and it nicely lays out the frankly barmy tone from there.
It’s hardly a stone cold horror classic; even though it’s probably by design, the acting is so wooden you could carve an end table out of them and its attempts to blur the identity of the killer by making its leads deeply flawed results in having no one to really root for. Ackles’ character is technically responsible for the original cave in and is plotting to sell the mine which will probably financially cripple the town, while Kerr Smith’s police chief is actively two-timing Jamie King’s rather insipid female lead. Furthermore, the film’s big twist isn’t much more than a reheated take on that old Psycho/Fight Club trope that can either comes across as stunningly unpredictable or simply just fucking dumb and as a result, it’s one of the only slasher movie climaxes that weirdly ends in a draw.
Still, despite some creaky plot devices, the film has a good handle on its more exploitative aspects, racking up an impressively splattery bodycount and having various pointy things and body parts obnoxiously fly out into the 3D specs wearing audience at any given opportunity – and if nothing else, it’s got a sizable role for genre stalwart Tom fuckin’ Sizemore to boot.
Unapologetically dumb, but all the more memorable for it, My Bloody Valentine’s second go round is savvy enough to shamelessly mine its gore and 3D effects to a teuly heartfelt degree.
Original or remake? Take your pick.
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