Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Writer's Block Review: "Hatchet" (2006/07)

 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”.)


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