Posts
To help me break with some writer’s block I have been suffering from since the large amount of writing I did for my finals in the middle of May, I am going back to basics. You might be saying, “you haven’t updated this blog in months.” To which I must replay, “yeah, I had other shit going on.”
A large
amount of this blog is just me writing about movies I have seen. For a time I would rank/review all the movies
I had seen from a given year. I stopped
emphasizing movies for whatever reason and now my brain is tired from thinking
bigger thoughts about the world and suffering and how people in power know
exactly how to fix it all, but they don’t.
Today I am
going to write on here something simple, much like how I started simple when I
went back to the gym following Covid.
Hatchet (2006/2007)
Written and Directed by Adam Green
Currently available on Amazon Prime.
The Premise
A boat tour of character actors sinks in the swamp near a haunted(?)
cabin and the various colorful characters are killed off in gruesome fashion by
the deformed
revenant that stalks the marshland.
The Good
While not everyone in the movie is a great actor even that
kind of works as it is more of a comedy.
The dialogue is frequently good, with quips and acting beats making it
feel true to the various characters in the movie. There is really no conversation or line that
feels like the wrong person is talking.
The make up and gore effects capture the goofy tone that the
dialogue does, and it all fits together quite well. They go for over the top and a few of them
shoot the moon.
Maybe I am shallow in that I consider the presence of Mercedes McNab to be a
highlight. She is gorgeous and has
perhaps the best comedic timing one could hope for in a bimbo character. I loved her as Harmony on “Buffy the Vampire
Slayer” and here she is elevating the dumb bimbo role to an artform.
I am not going to call out all the actors or the cameos/small roles for horror icons, but they all work well enough for this movie. Just some are better than others.
The Bad
I am glad they leaned in on the comedy. Holy hell is this one of the most derivative outlines
o a script you can get. This is exactly
the sort of cliché riddled movie that “Cabin in the Woods”
was mercilessly mocking and if they had tried to play it completely straight it
would have been complete garbage.
Bigger issues come with the shoestring budget, as Saturday
Night Live has more convincing swamp sets.
Worse for the horror side of the story, everything is lit to a comical
level… At one point they find a flashlight and its beam is completely drown out
by the lighting they just have as the default.
Keep in mind this is supposed to be night, in a foggy swamp, it should
be dark as hell. I can’t help but
imagine how you could light the woods in a way that makes it visually
interesting without completely breaking the conceit, but you would need a
lighting guy who costs money and they don’t have any of that.
As far as acting, unfortunately the worst performance is the
movie’s final girl, played by Tamara Feldman. She is playing this role way too straight and
comes off like someone from a more serious iteration of this material who got
lost. Bad direction? Maybe she just wasn’t into it because she did
not reprise the role for the sequel. Either
way it is the weakest acting on the character with perhaps the 2nd
or 3rd most screen time.
My biggest issue is with the ending, which I guess will be a
spoiled here. The ending feels like a
cheat on the characters. They are clever
earlier in the movie trying to concoct a plan that played on what they knew
about the monster’s origins, “let’s light him on fire, because his tragic
death involved him trying to escape a burning cabin” and their plan is foiled
by rain. This plan is good. And how it is foiled is also good. That should have been the climax and ending of
the movie, but that is instead the end of act two.
The ending comes when the characters have a protracted chase
thru a graveyard and seemingly defeat the monster by stabbing it in the
face. Stabbing in the face is not any
more effective than the myriad of other bullets, stabbings, and other harm they
have visited upon the monster and yet they think they beat it. The characters are surprised when the monster
shows back up and ostensibly kills the remaining characters. Downer ending, perfectly fine for this kind
of movie. BUT, that feels like a
betrayal of the characters who were previously shown to at least be trying to
get a handle on things.
To fix this I would have moved the chase scene to act 2, the
characters realize they can’t get away after being chased in a circle back to
the haunted cabin. They then try to use
the fire plan on the monster back at the haunted cabin, and then their plan is
foiled and they all die. Ramp up the
character’s knowledge and insight in how to fight the monster as time goes on,
make the audience feel like the characters are going thru an arc. Currently their knowledge goes up and then crashes
down.
For an example of how to do this well I have to point to the
first “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie. Nancy
forms a plan on how to defeat Freddy Krueger by pulling him out of the dream
world and into her house full of traps, it ostensibly works… but the twist
ending shows that Freddy was not actually defeated and the characters die. “Elm Street” ramped up to the twist ending,
it felt like a surprise and it doesn’t feel like the characters failed to try
everything they could.
The ending kind of ties into one more issue, there is no
character arc. You usually want to show
your protagonists dealing with some kind of trauma or weakness over the course
of the narrative, and by overcoming the weakness they help to overcome the
monster. In this instance the main
character is dealing with a breakup from a previous relationship and the final
girl is trying to investigate what happened to her brother and father. Logically, neither of these tie into fighting
a revenant… The best I could think is that during some key moment the Final
Girl’s father and brother could rise up as revenants to try and help her
escape? And logically the main guy
getting over his breakup by getting with the final girl would be the other side
of things, you would have to establish that she left him because he was not a
take-charge kind of guy and by the end of the movie he is a take-charge kind of
guy. Just… Something.
Conclusion
I don’t hate this movie, it is watchable. The humor elevates in enough that the
derivative elements and low production values are mostly forgiven. I can’t help but wonder if they could have
done something more creative with the backstory? Maybe if they had the budget to make the presentation
of the setting actually scary?
It is strange that one
of my oldest movie reviews on this blog is for “Phantasm” which was similarly
low budget but was far more creative with the premise… and I still like this
one more because the acting and dialogue is better. Maybe give Adam Green some money to work with
so that he can escape the horror-ghetto his career seems to be in and see what
he could do with something bigger and stranger? I could see him doing episodes of “Creepshow” or other horror
anthology series without breaking a sweat.
This is not the first movie by Adam Green I have seen. “Digging up the
Marrow”, which is sort of a cross between a mockumentary and the movie “Nightbreed” was, and it is
better than “Hatchet”… and better than “Nightbreed”.
(Sidenote on “Phantasm”, I no longer consider it the worst
movie I have ever seen by a long shot.
That title went to “Boyhood”.)
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
No comments:
Post a Comment