WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hatchet

Genius. Pure genius.

I refer, of course, to the marketing of the film. (Of the film itself … well, all in due course.) “Old school American horror” snarls the DVD sleeve, following up this assertion with “it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese” – a not particularly literate but certainly effective stiff middle finger to a decade or more’s worth of mainstream genre flicks.

Effective, that is, until you look at the two statements in a little more detail. “Old school American horror” suggests traditionalism: recognizable tropes, characters and imagery; whereas “it’s not a remake, it’s not a sequel and it’s not based on a Japanese” implies originality. Already there’s something of a dichotomy going on.

I’m going to make an assumption that writer/director Adam Green was intending to make a throwback to 70s/80s slasher flicks, on an appropriately low budget. The opening credits, set during Mardi Gras, demonstrate a fratboy aesthetic (beer, boobs and boorishness) unapologetically in tune with a less reconstructed time. While this kind of thing isn’t necessarily a negative, certainly for a horror film (the genre isn’t meant to be PC), there’s a kind of desperation to the way Green stages it. We’re not far off the tedious for-the-camera cavortings of a Girls Gone Wild video here.

The tits-out-but-no-actual-sex business continues as we’re introduced to our protagonists, two of whom – Misty (Mercedes McNab*) and Jenna (Joleigh Fioravanti) – are participating in just that kind of video under the direction of sleazoid Doug (Joel Murray**).

The rest of the gang comprise such finely drawn characters ciphers as Ben the dweeb (Joel David Moore), Marcus the cool kid (Deon Richmond), Marybeth the tough chick (Tamara Feldman) and Jim and Shannon the old couple (Richard Riehle and Patrika Darbo), all of whom set out for a bayou ghost cruise under the woefully incompetent stewardship of tour guide Shawn (Parry Shen).

En route through the murky, misty and atmospheric swamp (or at least it would be if Will Barratt’s cinematography wasn’t so flat and uninteresting), Marybeth recounts – as a corrective to Shawn’s half-arsed rambling – the legend of the deformed, spurned and resultingly psychotic Victor Crawley (Kane Hodder, he of Jason fame). Guess what happens next? The boat gets holed and sinks, our happy bunch find themselves stranded, and the hatchet-wielding Crawley comes raging out of the night to make mincemeat of them.

Anyone who hasn’t, by this point, identified the final girl and figured the black guy as expendable obviously hasn’t watched enough horror movies.

It takes Green half of his short (80 minute) running time to get to the blood and gore, but when he does he lets the broad comedy (the bitchy interplay between Misty and Jenna is cattily hilarious) take a backseat while the effects team deliver some decently visceral stuff in the face of what must have been a highly restrictive budget. There’s death by hatchet, death by shovel, death by handle of shovel, and mortal wounding by industrial sander (which, even allowing for the genre’s long-standing fascination with improperly used tools, is something I’ve not seen elsewhere). There’s also faces ripped open and limbs torn off, all of it accompanied by geysers of blood.

For all the “not based on a Japanese one” braggadocio, the OTT levels of blood-letting are entirely in keeping with the likes of ‘Machine Girl’, ‘Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl’, ‘Hard Revenge Milly’ et al. The presence of horror icons Kane, Robert Englund (a pre-credits cameo as a hillybilly) and Tony Todd (memorable but utterly wasted in a nothing role) point to more homegrown influences, and every situation the gang blunder into has its provenance in another, better, movie.

With more emphasis on the humour, ‘Hatchet’ could have been a piss-taking cult classic. Stripped of its pratfalls and leering douche-bagginess (amazingly, Word hasn’t underlined douche-bagginess, therefore it must be a legitimate expression – fuck me!!!), it could have been the down ‘n’ dirty throwback it was conceived as. However, it doesn’t go all out for either of these and therefore not only falls between two stools, but rips its own entrails out in doing so.

*McNab is still probably best known as the priggish Amanda in ‘Addams Family Values’.

**Bill Murray’s brother, believe it or not.

FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: Frozen

My contribution to this month’s Final Girl Film Club.

Fifteen minutes into ‘Frozen’ and I was mentally preparing my review. I was going to refer to it by what must surely have been its working title – ‘Three Douchebags on a Chairlift’ – and post this screengrab …

… just so I could sarcastically conjecture that the rest of the sign read “… from watching this movie”.

Then, round about the halfway mark, Adam Green’s admittedly (and it’s something I admit through gritted teeth) taut thriller began to exude a palpable sense of tension. And, even though I didn’t develop any great degree of sympathy, empathy or even give-a-shitness about the characters, I knew I’d have to see the film out. I had to know how it resolved.

Let’s get the characters out of the way. We have three student types: smug twat Dan (Kevin Zegers), wiseass fuckwad Joe (Shawn Ashmore) and Dan’s whiny girlfriend Parker (Emma Bell) Granted, Parker has good reason to be whiny since Dan treats her like a piece of meat and Joe spits snarky comments her way, but her whining just gets pitiful and annoying after a while. And by “a while”, I mean roughly ten minutes.

Here’s how annoying and whiny Parker is: Joe bitches to Dan while they’re in a café that they’ve had to waste a day on the “bunny slopes” because Parker is a novice skier and why did Dan have to bring her along, dude they could have done some real ski-ing but Dan totally brought his girlfriend along and why is he acting like such a pussy and not spending so much time with Joe anymore just because he’s, like, got a girlfriend. It’s so unfair. Joe stops his diatribe short of stamping a foot or sticking his tongue out. Which is shame. Dan, instead of telling Joe to get a life or smacking him upside the head and warning him not to diss the g/f (ie. the two most likely scenarios in reality) gives Joe a sheepish “uh, actually, dude, she’s right behind you” look. And Parker, instead of dumping the scalding contents of her Styrofoam cup of coffee into Joe’s lap, slapping Dan, calling them both fucking losers and going out and finding herself a guy who doesn’t secretly want to get all ‘Brokeback Mountain’ with his best bud (ie. the most likely scenario in reality), comes across all totally, oh my God, I’m so sorry I’ve come between you guys, I should never have come on this holiday, I should have just stayed at home and baked cookies and let you guys do the manly ski-ing thing and, I dunno, break out the KY jelly in the chalet afterwards.

So: two candyass guys and a girl who whinily acts like feminism never happened. Three douchebags on a chairlift, everyone.

How they get stranded on the chairlift is: they plead with Chairlift Operator #1 to let them take one last trip up to the summit even though he’s just about to shut up shop for the night. Won over by their charming way of whining and going “awww, c’mon maaaan” repeatedly and not saying please, he lets them. Chairlift Operator #2 wanders by and mentions to Chairlift Operator #1 that their boss (let’s call him Big Chief Chairlift) wants Chairlift Operator #1 to work next weekend. Chairlift Operator #1 goes off on one – turns out its his brother’s stag night on the date in question – and stomps away to give Big Chief Chairlift a piece of his mind. (At this point I was hoping director Adam Green would cut to the altercation in Big Chief Chairlift’s office and actually give this motherfucker some real drama.) Chairlift Operator #2 is left to shut up shop. Which he does very quickly because he’s bursting for a pee.

This leaves three douchebags stranded on a chairlift.

To begin with, they treat the matter as an annoyance. A surprisingly witty bit of badinage has our trapped trio debate the worst ways to die, a tombstone humour response to the minor inconvenience of the chairlift stopping (Green also seems to be presupposing the inevitable “it does for chairlifts what ‘Jaws’ did for sharks” comparisons of lazy critics*), before the string of lights which illuminate the length of the cableway go off and the gang get real about the possibility of being stuck up there all night. Then Parker reminds them that it’s Sunday and the resort only opens Friday to Sunday.

Panic sets in. Uncertainty manifests. Should they wait? Should one of them try jumping to the ground (“I might hurt myself, but I’ll be able to get down off the mountain and get help”)? Or is inching one’s way hand over hand along the cabling a better option (factoring in that the cable’s razor sharp)? One of the gang decides to jump. They’re a fairly athletic personage and confident that they can make it. They leap from the chairlift.

Let’s just pause here and review the options when jumping from any significant height. Does one:

(a) bend the knees and roll one’s body on impact;

or

(b) jump with legs rigidly extended and trust in the Lord?

This, folks, is an object lesson in what happens when you go with option (b):

It’s at this point that the wolves turn up.

Things pretty much go from bad to worse from hereon in.

‘Frozen’ incrementally develops into a gripping exercise in tension, enriched no end by the Philip Glass-style modulations of Andy Garfield’s score, and beautifully shot by Will Barratt who works a minor miracle in creating movement, scope and striking images in a film which restricts its protagonists to one unmoving locale for two-thirds of its running time.

Adam Green, best known for the grim and joyless ‘Hatchet’, wrings everything he can out of the material and the performances from the three leads are as good as can be expected given the often trite dialogue into which Green’s script retreats. This is the major contributing factor to the flaw that almost sinks the film: as excruciating as their ordeal becomes, it’s almost impossible to root for these douches. To be perfectly honest, I was rooting for the freakin’ wolves at one point! Don’t get me wrong, I dig the anti-hero as much as the next blogger – hell, give me an evil bastard whose out-and-out villainy throws the moral simplicity of the hero into sharp and unflattering relief and I’m as happy as a dipso in a liquor store – but, damn it, give your bastards and villains and anti-heroes some interesting dialogue. That, or make your heroes sympathetic enough for us to care about.

An exercise in tension can only ever remain just that – an exercise – if the characters are characterless and their interrelationships redundant.

*Notwithstanding that ‘Jaws’ earned its reputation by proving the best of any number of films about sharks. As opposed to the dearth of films about chairlifts. And, no, ‘Where Eagles Dare’ doesn’t count – that’s a cable car.