“Mr. Crowley”, sung Ozzy Oborne once “What went on in your head?”. Well, when it comes to the mindset of director Adam Green, is seems that the main thing that was buzzing through his brain when making a sequel to his splattery throwback, Hatchet, was to go all in and make its lumpy antagonist, Victor Crowley, a fully certified horror icon. History will probably suggest that he failed a little (Vic’s hardly a household name on the level of Freddy Krueger), but that doesn’t mean that the efforts of the gore stained cast and crew still can’t be enjoyed as a slice of throwaway fun.
If you want a moody swamp backdrop, a collection of victims-to-be engaging in adolescent banter and some gleefully over the top kills that sees people literally ripped limb from limb by gnarled, powerful mitts, then Hatchet II may certainly be your hook up. But does it deliver if you yearn for something a bit more? Behold the paradox of the slasher sequel.
We jump right back into the action the exact moment the first film ended, with Marybeth Dunston screaming in terror as she’s face to face with the bellowing, misshapen visage of a resurrected Victor Crowley, but instead of meeting the same, mangled fate as fellow members of a swamp tour that stumbled into his killing grounds, the young woman actually manages to escape and is rescued by the piss guzzling vagrant known as Jack Cracker. However, when Cracker discovers what Marybeth’s surname is, his demeanor changes but won’t divulge why and instead he suggests that she head back into town and speak to colourful local businessman, Reverend Zombie.
It seems that Zombie is clued up on Crowley’s history and actually has a plan to lift the curse of the malformed marauder once and for all and Marybeth is the key. You see, it turns out that her family has quite an intimate connection with Vic’s origin story. Arranging a lynch party of various assorted oddballs that includes the burly hunter Trent Graves, Zombie tells Marybeth that he’ll only allow her to tag along if she brings her uncle with her for emotional support (or something). So with her relative in tow, our heroine heads back into the cursed swamp to find the mauled bodies of her father and brother and bring them home, but Zombie has more commercial plans in mind. With the threat of Crowley pulping everyone coming within 100 meters of his stomping grounds, the not so good Reverend plans to take advantage of the new, available real estate and send out more tours while all the gator hunters can descend upon all these untouched samples.
Of course, big Vic isn’t going to take this shit lying down and after the usual bout of banter and exposition, Crowley gets down to pulling off a string of outlandishly brutal murders – but what exactly is Zombie’s plan to appease Victor’s ghost and what does it have to do with Marybeth?
The first Hatchet was an energetic, if rather basic, attempt to try and invoke the glory days of the slasher film by supposedly omitting some of the glossy tropes that attached itself, limpet like, after the genre’s 90s resurgence. However, while it displayed some truly resplendent kills that rightly scored high with rapid gorehounds, it curiously displayed a sophomoric sense of humour that felt more like an Eli Roth flick than anything resembling the original My Bloody Valentine or The Burning. This didn’t stop lovers of indie gore from giving it its seal of approval and a sequel was all but inevitable, but even though a returning Green had far more filmmaking experience thanks to frostbitten thriller, Frozen (no, not the Disney one – so let it go), Hatchet II ends up feeling like an oddly inferior experience compared to the first.
That’s not to say that Crowley’s second outing isn’t without its selling points as hardcore horror fans will find that they’ve been catered to pretty well. For a start, anyone with a working knowledge of the genre in general will no doubt get starry-eyed over the cast which not only replaces original Marybeth actress Amara Zaragoza with frequent Halloween actress, Danielle Harris, but we also get Tony Todd (Candyman), R.A. Mihailoff (Leatherface from the third Texas Chainsaw), Tom Holland (director of Child’s Play and Fright Night), frequent indie actor/producer AJ Bowen and even a cameo from Troma honcho himself, Lloyd Kaufman. When you throw in a returning Kane Hodder still swapping Jason’s hockey mask for Crowley’s soiled dungarees and special effects guru John Carl Buechler reprising his cameo role as urine swigging Cracker Jack, and you have a horror line up that pretty damn impressive to those in the know.
Also, giving the late, great Todd expanded screen time as the scheming Reverend Zombie is always a smart choice and his guttural line readings manage to make his large dollops of exposition fairly painless.
Also helping is the series’ love of spectacularly graphic gore that certainly gets another showing this time out and when we aren’t cheering while watching skulls be ground down with sand grinders, jaw bones being torn out and faces get obliterated by boat propellers, we’re being treated to remarkably nasty gore gags that sees a beheaded man finish having sex as his death throes causes him to thrust faster. However, as entertaining as this all is, despite with the occasional killer line and frequent showers of warm plasma, Hatchet II isn’t actually an improvement over the original, which had an major advantage thanks to the surprise value. Yet despite playing all the greatest hits and delivering more of Crowley’s backstory, Green is mainly doing the same old stuff while adding nothing new to proceedings.
It’s here that we discover the paradox that I mentioned about in the intro. Green seems content not to re-invent the wheel, provide a more complex storyline or even offer noticably better production values and just wants to deliver a bog standard follow up to his earlier hit. However, while his ain’t broke, don’t fix it attitude fits well within the original’s down and dirty, throwback aesthetic, delivering the exact same experience seems like a little bit of a waste of time and the director seems to be coasting a little on his own franchise. Say what you will about Eli Roth’s two Hostel entries, but at least you could tell there was a progression between the two as was there between Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow and it’s sequel and lets not forget how much more ambitious the Terrifier films progressively got.
That’s not to say that Hatchet II hasn’t got the goods (I genuinely love both the abrupt beginning and ending), but it truly is a shame that Green didn’t want to bring more to his franchise than just awesome kills and horror cameos. I mean, I suppose that with the rules he’s restrained himself with when it comes to Crowley, going to New York, waking up in the future or having a Christmas themed installment is somewhat out of the question – but watching a supernatural, deformed, maniac chop a dude in half and then whip his skin off in one jerk like a magician with a table cloth is admittedly awesome, but it’ll only get you so far in life.
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