El hacha

Over-the-Top Gory and Violent Louisiana Swamp Slasher Comedy.

Good: The cast and acting works. Well above average for the genre. The violence and gore is mostly kept on-screen and in focus. No CGI, just good old special effects. Extra points for real vomiting. While this is a pretty gory movie, it is actually a comedy, with varying degrees of success. The violence serves as a comedic aspect parallel to the jokes. And it works, for the most part.

The killings, that is.

Bad: The verbal humor is admittedly also better than average for the genre, but it gets too much for my taste. This movie doesn't even try to be scary, and the cast are yapping on, sit-com style, throughout the movie. Luckily they haven't screwed it up as much as they could have, and the verbal humor does serve as a build-up to hysterical bursts of laughter during the killing scenes. It works and is funny at times, but it's just too much overall.

The villain's back story is thin, goofy and uninteresting. Crowley himself works sometimes, but sometimes not. He's certainly no new Jason or Michael in my opinion.

However, despite all its flaws, I felt entertained. While there are much fewer and "shorter" killings in this film, I can't remember seeing something this in-your-face gory since Braindead. The over-the-top gore and the sickly hilarious ways in which it's presented are this movie's strong points, while the plot and (partially) the humor are its weak points.

I went to see this film in part due to praise heaped on it by previous reviewers who had described it as clever and a fresh addition to the genre.

And it was .. for at least the first ~45 minutes or so.

I was immediately drawn in, the dialogue was notably above par for the genre, full of witty quips and more subtle bits of humor that reference horror classics. In the opening scenes we see notable cameos from Robert Englund ("Nightmare On Elm Street" series) and Tony Todd (of "Candyman" series fame). A respectable flashback sequence is included to introduce the "Hatchet" back story.

And so the movie takes off running, seemingly quite well. Fresh and unique, forging a new path through the wastleland of redundant slasher flicks as "Sean of the Dead" and "Scream" had done in previous years.

Unfortunately about half way through, this movie does a complete about-face. The witty banter is replaced with idiotic dribble more reminiscent of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" than the first half of the film. It's almost as if they fired an adept writer halfway through the script and replaced him with the proverbial thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters.

At this point the dam breaks, and the tired clichés pour through in droves. We are treated to a prolonged scene of foliage inspection and other such nonsense to fill the reel between death scenes. The characters repeatedly wait to flee screaming in panic until *after* they have disabled or incapacitated the title baddie. The only dread anticipation built in the second half is whether this film will be the schoolbus that was hit by the train, or the one that managed to avoid it.

Once the gore fest begins, it is eerily reminiscent of early "Troma" titles, over the top and fatuous. The "Hatchet" character even seems like it might have been modeled from the "Toxic Avenger". I can appreciate the merits of a lawn sprinkler arterial spray or projectile vomiting, on occasion, but modern film gore effects really have no excuse to still be of that "BrainDead" visual quality.

Despite the dual personalities of this film, I think it still manages to hack out a few good parts.

• 5/10 -

Hatchet (2006) is another of those modern horror movies that tries to copy the magic of 80's horror's, although it did have some sort of 80's feel, it just didn't have much else.

The storyline was boring and predictable, and i didn't really care for any of the characters either, and some people have "TRIED" to claim that Victor Crowley, is the next horror icon......... Don't MAKE ME LAUGH!!!!! Anyway, the story is about a group of people who decide to go on a haunted swamp tour and they get hunted down and killed off one by one by a disfigured killer. It's all rather boring and predictable and just average to be honest, it's only saving grace is the gory death scenes, of which some were very good. So all in all, i give Hatchet 5/10.

The tag-line "Old School American Horror" is a little misleading. While it's true that "Hatchet" recalls the mad gore of the 1980s, the "horror" factor is actually absent. Watching the film feels more like viewing a condensed reel of slasher kills with a few drunk and fun-loving friends - certainly not a bad thing, but not exactly a horror movie either. That being said, it's obvious that the people involved in the production have a real love for the genre. Kane Hodder's monster antics are always a delight, and Adam Green will definitely be a name to watch in the future.

In summary, I'd certainly recommend the film for anyone who gets a kick out of the slasher craze of the 80s, but be sure you're in the mood for goofy fun and not an actual horror flick.

Trying to get over his girlfriend leaving him, Ben (Joel David Moore) joins his friends in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where there are plenty of women to go around. But Ben doesn't want women, he wants adventure, so he goes off on a haunted swamp tour... but as luck would have it, one of the haunted tales has a grain of truth to it: Victor Crowley is prowling the swamps!

Is Moore the new go-to guy for horror? While he's more memorable in "Dodgeball", he seems to be making more appearances in horror ("The Dead One"), and I welcome it. Writer-Director Adam Green picked a good leading man. I also love that Tony Todd and Robert Englund appear as minor characters and Kane Hodder appears out of makeup or without a mask (at least part of the time). Between this film and "Leslie Vernon", it seems like there's an effort to move the main horror veterans of this era (the 1980s-1990s) to the background and bring in new faces. And if these two films are any example, it's working.

This film is working in the 1980s style: it's just plain fun. Some level of plot development is here, but not really any more than is needed -- the focus is strictly on the slashing of the heroes and on showing excessive blood spray. We have a hero (actually a heroine) who sort of knows what is going on and henchmen who just die (think "Evil Dead II"). And for the beginning of the film, we have humor and nudity. Hooray! (Actually, there's nudity here and there throughout the film.)

The best part of this film -- the blood -- is also the worst part. If you want something more than brainless slasher, you have the wrong film. There's no deep thinking here, and the background of the monster doesn't make a lot of sense. How does he survive attacks and fire? Who knows? And even as the film progresses, there's no shift to moving the plot forward... don't expect some big revelation or anything, because you won't find it in this film. Just kids running in the woods.

Listening to the commentary is a great way to learn how to make a film with no budget and how to set it in New Orleans when there is no New Orleans -- reuse extras as much as possible, shoot scenes with doors in other cities so the actors don't have to travel... and many other little tricks. Adam Green may be a genius in this regard, pushing low budget to its most beautiful extreme.

This film was given to horror fans as the answer to the drought in horror goodness, and I think they may have over-hyped it. I know it won a variety of awards at film festivals, and I'm not going to say it didn't deserve them. But this also isn't going to be the best film you'll see all year, so if you've been holding out for a hero, this won't be the film, probably. Sorry, Bonnie Tyler. But it is good... very good, for what it is.