Gone Magazine

Nothing Screams Boring Like A 3-D Trip To The Grocery Store

When I heard that the powers that be (Lionsgate) were remaking an obscure slasher film from the eighties (a week before it came out) and it was in 3-D I casually lost my shit. 3-D is a huge selling point for me, though the way it’s used has yet to really be perfected, and the fact that I’d held no particular fondness for the original flick was a bonus, but the old sentiment still rings true: 3-D can’t save a shitty movie. Valentine begins, promisingly enough, with newspaper clippings jumping from the screen bringing us up to speed. Apparently ten years ago a mining accident blah blah blah, the plot is instantly forgettable and why the hell would you be paying attention anyway when everything is flying at you from so many directions? This entire opening sequence is terrific, exactly what a 3-D movie should be, but it quickly loses purpose when it tries to update itself with pointless narrative. Who the fuck goes to see a slasher film on a friday night hoping for social commentary that goes beyond graphic nudity*? 3-D is really just a vehicle for action and cheap scares, something this movie really gets in the first half hour. The writing is funny, the acting is funny, the gore is obscene and then out of nowhere, the film succumbs to multiple personality disorder. On one hand, you’ve got a gory little ham sandwich of a flick, wearing it’s influences on it’s vest, and on the other you’ve got something that wants to be in your DVD collection, something good enough you’d go see without the bells and whistles and but it doesn’t understand itself well enough to do so, which comes as no surprise as the director’s credits include Dracula 2000, White Noise 2 and the Prophecy 3 and one of the writers worked on Jason X (Jason In Space, for the novices) which, contrary to popular belief, is actual a pretty fun flick. To sum it up, it’s not worth ten bucks. But if you still want to see it, be warned that not all theaters are guaranteed to be showing this in 3-D, which really would be pointless. The most I would suggest is sneaking out of Paul Blart: Mall Cop to catch the first thirty minutes. Though, if you’d actually planned on seeing Mall Cop I can’t help you. Also, I’d like to point out for future reference that this technology doesn’t lend itself to a lot of nudity and I’m not sure if I dreamt it but I recall reading something about porn in Real-D (a rather unfortunate name), and the producers were having a hard time finding male leads so if anyone else read the article please let me know.

*This is something that horror films of the past twenty years or so have struggled with, unsuccessfully, particularly the ones of the slasher variety. I believe Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake is a perfect example. The reason that the original film works so well is that there isn’t a lot of back story. The most terrifying thing about it is that it just starts happening. Same thing with the first two installments of Friday the 13th and the original Nightmare. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be plot development and narrative structure, I’m just saying that most of these guys are doing it wrong. Take Rosemary’s Baby, the original Wicker Man or Cannibal Holocaust even. These films give us an engrossing story, a reason to be terrified. When you look at the themes of Horror, something these new guys (other than Behind The Mask and maybe some of the stuff Eli Roth is doing, and I mean MAYBE) don’t seem to get, you see the ingredients of Fear. This is a call to all you would-be film makers: let’s get Horror back on track.

R. K. Haney