Before there was Terrifier, there was Hatchet – sort of.
Allow me to explain: by the time 2006 rolled around, horror fans were well a truly sick of flashy, snarky neo-slashers and endless glossy remakes that stubbornly seemed ignorant of what make the originals so great in the first place. A desire to return to the good old days was rife within the fandom to when things were grittier; such things as gore and copious female nudity weren’t shied away from and that anything goes, fuck the system mentality of 70s horror was still alive and well. In fact, when Adam Green’s Hatchet was released, it even proudly displayed the words “Old School American Horror” directly under the title on the poster – but could a little indie slasher possibly manage to successfully invoke a bygone decade, or was the hype a bit too much expectation to heap onto a lumpy, supernatural murderer in dungarees?
It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans and gawky, recently single Ben isn’t enjoying the multiple pairs of flashed boobs as much as his friend, Marcus is; however, in an attempt to get his mind off his cheating ex, Ben proposes that they ditch their other drunk, lecherous buddies and go on a midnight haunted swamp tour instead. Marcus is obviously not happy that his quota of ogling jiggling breasts is going to drop sharply, but eventually decides to do Ben a solid and go even if the only tour that visits certain parts of the swamp looks a little bit shabby.
Anyway, as the boat sets off, we get to meet the rest of the passengers and alongside Ben and Marcus, we have kindly Minnesotaian tourists Jim and Shannon Permatteo; shifty agent Shapiro who hopes to shoot a Girls Gone Wild video with two vapid models, Misty and Jenna and finally we have the quiet and mysterious Marybeth who quickly rebuffs Ben’s well meaning but awkward attempts at friendship. However, it’s not long before it becomes horribly apparent that their tour guide simply doesn’t have the first fucking clue as to what he’s doing and his novice credentials are truly set in stone after he crashes the boat which promptly sinks to the bottom of the bayou. Add to this Jim getting wounded by a passing alligator and you’d be hard pressed to suggest that the night could get any worse for this hapless, stranded batch of holiday makers. However…
Lurking somewhere in the swamps is the malformed, disfigured, hulking frame of Victor Crowley, the ghost of a deformed man who was accidently killed by his caring father after a cruel prank went tragically wrong and after his patriarch eventually died of a broken heart ten years after inadvertently splitting his son’s boney face in half with a hatchet, Crowley’s spirit haunts the area like a juggernaut of destruction, waiting to tear any interloper limb from limb.
Let’s put it this way: there’s a damn good chance that none of the tourists are going to get their $40 back…
Just how much you embrace Hatchet will probably depend on how you watch it as its mileage tends to vary depending on how seriously you take its claims that it was a full-blooded return to old school horror. Years later, Damien Leone managed to turn the same trick, turning his grotty and truly demented Terrifier franchise into something of a modern miracle that truly earned its throwback status and cemented it’s figurehead, Art the Clown, into a modern, horror icon, but in comparison, Hatchet wasn’t that dissimilar to Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, another small, quirky, indie flick that unfairly had the future of the entire genre placed on its shoulders. In fact, I initially remember being quite disappointed with Hatchet as I was expecting something as truly harrowing as the original The Hills Have Eyes or at least something as nasty as The Burning. However, when I found out that Hatchet was just another horror/comedy that contained just as many jokes as the neo-slashers it was claiming to replace, I couldn’t help but feel let down by Adam Green’s spirited, but rather basic, take on old school horror.
However, I truly believe that if I had first watched Hatchet in the company of like-mined horror fans in a packed midnight screening, there’s a very good chance that the rating would have an extra star, because this isn’t really the sort of film you watch on your own in silence. No, this is a movie you need booze, snacks and friends around for who are more than happy to cheer for every spot of frenzied gore, every shameless cameo and every nipple that graces the screen for Hatchet’s 84 minute runtime. Simply put, it’s a party movie and while the sophomoric, frat boy humour may be more Eli Roth than Wes Craven, with an audience with a high blood/alcohol level and a good sense of irony, Hatchet probably kills just as effectively as its Elephant Man-shaped murderer.
For a start, you can tell that Green loves the genre and is just as enthused to tip his hat to the dopier end of the horror spectrum as he is the classier stuff and if you needed any more proof, we even get a neat procession of horror superstars pulling cameo duty such as Robert Englund, Tony Todd and even The Blair Witch Project’s Joshua Leonard shows up for a little bit – but the real get here is casting Kane Hodder (aka. still the best Jason Voorhees there even was) as Victor Crowley, smothering him completely in twisted latex and having him dive head first into John Carl Buechler’s extravagant gore effects. Yes, the cast (which contains the recognisable faces of Dodgeball’s Joel David Moore and Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Mercedes McNab) make the characters bearable with some legitimately good jokes dotted between the usual, inane, victim banter, but it’s the excitable bloodletting that truly brings the house down as Crowley obliterates his victims with his bare hands. When he isn’t gifting a screaming woman with a brand new flip-top head (complete with flapping tongue) or grinding down someone’s jaw with a belt sander, he’s twisting heads off like bottle caps and it’s nice and spectacular and does manage to play like an exaggerated memory of when old school slashers weren’t deconstructed completely by overzealous censors.
However, for all of its youthful exuberance for bringing back a more freestyling brand of horror, in the cold light of day Hatchet is more of a fun spoof with exemplary gore than obtaining the iconic status of the movies it’s looking up to. Hodder’s split-faced Crowley is a lumbering engine of destruction, true, but as an enduring horror anti-hero, he’s actually kind of bland, lacking the memorable qualities of a Jason, a Leatherface, a Michael or even, yes, an Art.
Still, if it’s dude jokes, free range mammeries and resplendent gore you’re looking for, then Hatchet hooks you up nicely with a film that plays to a crowd far better than you initially might think. Far from hack work.
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