My Bloody Valentine 3D
Gimmick Hack-and-Slash is heavy on the “Hack”
LionsGate Films
A horror movie with 3D in the title implies an unspoken promise that if you come you can expect at least one head/eyeball/limb to fly at you, massive 3D boobs, and a barrage of other unlikely objects thrust at you at every opportunity. I was hoping that maybe the filmmakers would choose to embrace the opportunity to make something fun and unabashedly gimmicky that had a campy, clumsy self-aware charm. Instead, they just made a bad movie.
Honestly, they didn’t even fucking try. They really did the absolute minimum possible to scrape together a movie, and they didn’t try to hide it. The result was a montage of stock scenes executed in the blandest and cheapest way available. Even in the face of the audience’s exceptionally low expectations, this was a disappointing effort.
The resident town terror is a psychopathic miner that carries around heart chocolates for no other reason then to try and drag-out the film’s theater run into February. The slathered on gore looked like something your uncle whipped up for his back-yard haunted house last Fall. My jaw dropped at the absurdity of what they thought they could slide by with. Even the bottom rung actors they recruited to puppet the roles shrugged through the scenes with minimum interest, seeming to not want to exert any unnecessary effort in order to save their “chops” for when a better project rolled ’round.
Sure, the gimmick factor was there, but even the elements that you would think would be cool were not as much fun as they might sound. You know you’re in trouble when a busty midget and a blond in a five-minute naked chase scene isn’t enough to save your film.
I knew there would be a lot of nudity in the movie, what I didn’t expect was that it was all packed into a single scene. Why pay multiple actresses to take their tops off just for a scene when you can rent one hooker to take it all off for the day? Be forewarned, if you come for tits just hope you don’t chose the wrong time to go grab a coke from the concession stand, or you will miss the boat. Aside from that one, albeit lengthy and snatch-filled, moment the rest of the film features no nudity, or for that matter, sexually risqué material at all. None. Which seemed like a oddly perplexing decision.
From a technical standpoint, live-action 3D leaves a lot to be desired. The screen was annoyingly dark and the 3D part of it basically meant blurring out large portions of the screen in every shot. I saw Bolt in 3D and loved the way they used the effect, but I just don’t think the technology is perfected enough to be used impressively on non-animated features.
You are better off just renting “High Tension” and dusting off your old Magic-eye book. Really, just don’t bother.
-Laura Gaddy