Charisma That Pops Off The Screen | My Bloody Valentine 3-D star Jensen Ackles gives a performance so real you can practically reach out and touch him!
MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D
Directed by Patrick Lussier. Starring Jensen Ackles, Jaime King, Kerr Smith, Edi Gathegi. Now playing.
**1/2
The problem with reviewing My Bloody Valentine 3-D is that as much as it is a fairly predictable slasher film, it’s a fairly predictable slasher film in 3-D — and the thing about 3-D technology is that it almost always makes movies far more entertaining than they have any right to be. Such is the case here, as director Patrick Lussier’s remake of the 1981 Canadian horror cult classic throws objects at the camera with such frequency that you end up remembering more about all the pickaxes flying toward you than you do about the plot. But is that really such a bad thing?
The story — as much of it as I can recall — revolves around Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), who has returned to the mining town of Harmony after being gone for 10 years. He discovers that his ex-girlfriend Sarah (Jaime King) is now married to his former high school nemesis Axel Palmer (Kerr Smith), who is also conveniently the town sheriff. And, of course, his return comes on the anniversary of the Valentine’s Day killing spree by homicidal miner Harry Warden (Rich Walters) that initially caused him to leave. It is then only a matter of time (about five minutes) before someone dressed up in Warden’s old mining gear starts killing off the citizens of Harmony.
To be clear, the movie has no greater ambition than to be an R-rated 3-D film; Lussier wants to do nothing more than find excuses to make explicit images pop out of the screen at the audience. Among the items that are conveniently thrown in the direction of the camera: an eyeball, several guns, a lower jawbone, breasts, explosions, and a vagina.
But don’t mistake the full frontal nudity in My Bloody Valentine for simple lewdness; it belongs to the tradition of campy slasher originals like Friday the 13th, where the removal of clothes signifies imminent death. And boy, are those deaths gory! Very few of the characters die off-camera, and the rest expire amid a large splattering of blood and muscle tissue. Showing it all in 3-D makes it that much more disgusting.
Unfortunately, Lussier uses up most of his camera tricks pretty quickly, after which he’s content merely to reuse angles that he presumably thinks look the most stunning in three dimensions. (It feels like half the movie was shot from behind chainlink fences.) The 3-D novelty soon starts to wear off, to the point where you start to wonder if the movie would be interesting at all in 2-D. The reality is that a three-second close-up of a bloody pickaxe isn’t remotely scary when it doesn’t appear to be coming out of the screen. At worst it’s tiresome, and at best it eats up screen time that would otherwise be devoted to the overacting of Kerr Smith.
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