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Synopsis:
Outside Valentine Bluffs, a shift at the mine ends. Eager to blow off
steam, the miners head for town, where preparations for the upcoming
Valentine’s Day dance are in full swing. A number of the miners meet up
with their girlfriends at the Union Hall, where the dance is to be held.
Outside, Mayor Hanniger (Larry Reynolds) praises the head organiser,
Mabel Osborne (Patricia Hamilton), for her hard work, but suggests that
the fact that this is the town’s first dance for twenty years
not
be emphasised. Approaching the hall, the Mayor and Mabel are horrified
when a young man staggers through the door, his head split open….but the
“victim”, Howard Landers (Alf Humphreys), soon starts laughing. With the
arrival of his father, T.J. Hanniger (Paul Kelman) immediately leaves
the hall. Another of the miners, Axel Palmer (Neil Affleck), observes
that T.J. isn’t exactly thrilled to be back in town. The Mayor retorts
angrily that it isn’t his
fault that T.J.’s attempt to make it on his own failed so dismally;
adding that now he is
back, he’ll work in the mine whether he likes it or not. As the Mayor
and Chief of Police Jake Newby (Don Francks) head out to attend a
meeting, Howard runs after them, handing the Mayor a heart-shaped
candy-box and explaining that it was found at the hall when everyone
arrived. Out on the road in the Chief’s car, the Mayor opens the box.
Inside is an anonymous note, warning him to “remember what happened”.
Below that, concealed in tissue paper, is a human heart. The Mayor cries
out in horror that it can’t
be happening again, it can’t….
That night, at the local watering-hole, bartender ‘Happy’ (Jack Van
Evera) regales everyone with the story of the town’s last Valentine’s
dance. Twenty years earlier, two mine supervisors, eager to get to the
party, left work without checking the methane levels below ground. An
explosion occurred, trapping five miners. Six weeks later they were dug
out, one of them, Harry Warden (Peter Cowper), still alive but totally
insane, having resorted to cannibalism to survive. Harry was
institutionalised, but broke out a year later and returned to town,
murdering the two supervisors and cutting out their hearts, which were
left in candy-boxes at the dance, along with a warning that no more
dances were ever to be held. This warning was heeded….until this year.
Happy also insists that every year since the tragedy, on Valentine’s
Day, Harry has returned to town, clad in full mining regalia and looking
for someone to kill. The bar customers scoff at Happy’s grim tale. As
the evening progresses, tensions mount between T.J. and Axel over the
latter’s girlfriend, Sarah (Lori Hallier), who went with T.J. before his
abrupt departure from town. Chief Newby is horrified to learn that the
State asylum cannot verify the whereabouts of Harry Warden. Meanwhile,
at her laundromat, Mabel finds a heart-shaped candy-box on a table;
while outside, a figure in mining gear stands watching her….
Comments:
Well, well, well…. Back when I reviewed
Halloween II,
I made some attempt to define the difference between “the horror movie”
and “the slasher movie”. I also made the comment that while I had seen
some effective slashers, I had yet to see one that I felt qualified as a
good film; and while I’m not necessarily prepared to stick my neck out
quite so far as to claim that My Bloody
Valentine is
a good film,
I am
prepared to say this: it’s….not bad.
I am aware, however, and you should be too, that this review is being
written in a biased state of mind. I have a web DVD rental subscription,
and the guy who supplies my films likes to play little jokes, often
sending discs paired up by either real or spurious connections. So when
I was due to receive My Bloody Valentine,
it was sent off in partnership with – what else? –
Valentine.
I chose to watch the newer film first; and since
Valentine
could be fairly described as a ninety-minute summary of everything that
is wrong with the contemporary horror movie, this viewing order had the
effect of throwing My Bloody Valentine’s
modest virtues into rather startling relief.
It is to be supposed that
Paramount, being a respectable studio and all, experienced a few qualms
when it released
Friday The 13th
in May of 1980; certainly the company’s temerity saw it on the receiving
end of a wave of moral outrage. However, there’s nothing like the colour
of green for soothing away any inconvenient scruples. Not only did Sean
Cunningham’s calculated exercise in blood-letting generate the kind of
profits that would cure a studio executive of anything short of an arrow
through the base of the throat, but it had the side-effect of unleashing
a positive deluge of imitations. While a few of the new batch of horrors
strove for a little originality, most of them – as, indeed, is still the
case today – chose simply to pick up the
Friday The 13th
formula and run with it: a traumatic event, an anniversary, a killer on
the loose, a last-minute unmasking….nothing could be simpler. The six
months following Friday The 13’s
release saw Terror Train,
Prom Night,
He Knows You’re Alone
and You Better Watch Out
hit the cinemas. What a time to be alive, hey? Paramount, possibly
indignant at seeing its cash-cow being milked by everyone but itself (so
much for moral qualms), retaliated with the inevitable
Friday The 13th
Part 2, and
with My Bloody Valentine.
The two films have more in common than just their model: both were the
victims of the punitive mode of censorship to which the slasher film
phenomenon had given birth; both had their murder scenes substantially
trimmed before gaining the required ‘R’ rating. (And both, at least in
the US, remain unrestored to this day. Word is that the film-makers
still retain the cut footage from My Bloody
Valentine, and
offered it to Paramount when the film was slated for DVD release. As it
did for the F13
movies – as it is
doing, unbelievably, for the upcoming F13
box set – the studio chose to put out the shortened version.) When the
two films are looked at side by side, it is clear that the MPAA’s
activities had a less detrimental effect upon
My Bloody Valentine.
Don’t get me wrong: the film is just as emasculated as
F13:2;
however, the editing job done on My Bloody
Valentine
wasn’t quite so cack-handed, so that you
feel the cuts a
bit less jarringly. But the real difference between the two is more
fundamental than that. Despite the fact that
F13:2
is my favourite of the franchise, as far as I have got with it, I have
to concede that My Bloody Valentine
is simply a better film.
So, what exactly do I like
about My Bloody Valentine?
Well, first off, there’s the fact that it actually has something
resembling a legitimate story. It is standard practice, of course, to
judge a slasher film by its kill-scenes, but personally I’ve always felt
that it is the material surrounding the murders by which such a film
stands or falls. What’s the point of fabulously staged murders if you’ve
put the audience to sleep before it gets to them? So I can say this for
My Bloody Valentine:
I was able to sit through its non-kill material without yawning,
fidgeting, fast-forwarding, or flicking through the cable program to see
what else I could have been watching. (Ooh!
Burnt Offerings!)
I developed no particularly passionate hatred of any of the characters –
not even of the Odious Comic Relief. And I didn’t
once
bellow, “Oh, will
you GET ON WITH IT!!” – meaning, I suppose, that the murders are
well-timed. The film has, I feel, two genuine distinctions. One is its
setting. One of the features of film-making from the seventies and early
eighties, one that is particularly noticeable in the horror movies of
the time – and all the more so when you compare them to the high-gloss
emptiness of today – is a certain
grittiness.
This may have been intentional, or a lucky accident of the film stock of
the time; either way, it lends character to the productions.
My Bloody Valentine
not only has this rough-edged feel to its credit, but builds on it by
having been shot on location. Valentine Bluffs – “The Little Town With
The Big Heart” – is real
in a way that you rarely encounter in a film of this kind, and this
lends the production an unusual degree of credibility. Then, too, the
story is set in February; and throughout, there is a palpable chill in
the air. (Sorry, gang – no skinny-dipping in
this
one! In fact, amazingly, there’s no nudity at all…!) The small mining
community sits in a windswept, barren region of Canada; when T.J.
convinces Sarah to come with him to “their place”, this is no romantic
nook, but a rocky shore on a fairly forbidding stretch of coastline, the
metal towers of the mine clear in the background. The town itself seems
somehow….huddled, being made up of small, basically designed buildings
and people living inescapably regulated lives. The whole community
revolves around its mine. Every man in the town, it seems, bar the Chief
of Police, is reliant upon it for his living; and though they might
dream of flight, the experiences of T.J. demonstrate only too clearly
that such things are easier imagined than done. It is perfectly
believable that in such a place, something as seemingly mundane as a
Valentine’s Day dance could assume an unnatural degree of importance.
Then, too, the preparations for the dance that we see are almost
touchingly realistic: nothing over the top here, just crepe paper
streamers and cut-out paper hearts, all whipped about by the icy wind
that never ceases to buffet the small town.
The other thing that
My Bloody Valentine
does really well, perhaps as well as any of the “occasion” slasher
movies (although admittedly, there is a whole morass of Christmas
horrors out there into which I’ve yet to dip so much as a toe), is
exploit its premise. In this, there is no doubt that it manages to outdo
its model. There is no real reason, after all, why
Friday The 13th
should be called “Friday The 13th”,
except to sound ominous; it could just as well have been called
Monday The 17th,
or Wednesday The 28th,
for all the difference it would have made to the action of the film.
My Bloody Valentine,
on the other hand, after flicking a wink at its predecessor – its
Valentine’s Day falls upon a Saturday, meaning that some of its killings
take place on
Friday the 13th – has an absolute field day corrupting and
undermining this most dubious of “holidays”. (Thus earning itself an
enduring place in the affections of anyone disgusted by the crass
commercialism of a day supposedly about disinterested emotion, sick of
singularity being treated like it was some kind of shameful disease, or
both.) In the early section of the film, Valentine Bluffs is awash with
red: red love hearts, red streamers, red balloons, red-fringed banners.
The town is awash with red in the latter part of the film, too, but it’s
a rather different
red. Heart-shaped boxes abound, containing not candy, but humans hearts,
these accompanied by hilarious doggerel verses that are, let’s face it,
no worse than your average Hallmark greeting. (Mabel’s
Roses are red/Violets are blue/One is dead/And so are
you! is kind of
cute, but it’s hard to go past everyone’s laureate standard favourite:
It happened once/It happened twice/Cancel
the dance/Or it’ll happen thrice!)
And of course, the film itself is centred upon a love triangle….which
ends when the girl caught between two men gets fed up with their asinine
behaviour, and dumps the pair of them. Ain’t love grand? Unsurprisingly
under the circumstances, the ramifications of this tangled love affair
prove to have an influence on the outcome of the story.
Nor should we overlook the
fact that the killings in My Bloody
Valentine are
triggered in the first place by a heart – a tattoo heart that makes its
appearance in the film’s unforgettable opening sequence. Unlike many
slashers, My Bloody Valentine
chose not to open with the inevitable flashback sequence that “explains”
its action. Instead, it begins abruptly with the unexpected sight of two
people in mining gear making their way through an ill-lit tunnel. One of
the two begins to undress….revealing herself to be a blonde woman of
indeterminate age, with the inflammatory tattoo positioned on the curve
of her left breast. Her companion declining to shed
his
gear, the woman begins fondling his air-hose (no, really….), an activity
which comes to an abrupt end when our mystery man slams her backwards
onto the point of his pick, embedded in the wooden wall behind the pair
of them. Cue title card. The flashback scene does eventually happen, and
it’s a beauty – in fact, it’s the highlight of the film. This is the
other creditable thing about My Bloody
Valentine: it’s
not set in a mining town just for the heck of it, it makes full use of
its background. We learn early in the film that there hasn’t been a
Valentine’s dance in Valentine Bluffs for twenty years, and it is not
much longer before we learn why.
As do all good slashers,
My Bloody Valentine
comes complete with its very own Voice Of Doom: in this case, a grim-visaged
bartender going by the unlikely sobriquet of
Happy. The miners
and their girls spend the evening at the local bar (at which point we
discover that My Bloody Valentine
was not only shot in Canada, as so many slashers of this era were, but
also set there – or so we infer from the tide of Moosehead beer that
regularly threatens to engulf the production). As they discuss the
upcoming dance, they are interrupted by Happy, who warns them---no,
not
that they are, “Doomed! Doomed!”,
but rather that, “This town is accursed!” The tale of Harry Warden
follows, and we listen to the voice of Happy as his words overlay a
nearly wordless and soundless depiction of the mining tragedy and the
murders that altered the town forever. This is a wonderful sequence,
surreal and creepy and funny all at once. Happy goes on to warn his
scoffing audience that Harry still lurks around Valentine Bluffs,
returning every Valentine’s Day to check that no-one has violated his
warning that no more dances should ever be held – which, this year,
someone has.
Happy’s recital is illustrated with shots of the mysterious Harry,
dressed in his work gear and with his pickaxe dripping blood. Whether or
not the film’s killer actually is
Harry, well, that remains to be seen; but sure enough, it is someone who
roams the night in full mining regalia: an unusually realistic yet
wholly intimidating figure. The last third of
My Bloody Valentine
takes place within the mine itself, a number of the murder scenes lit
only by the spotlight of the killer’s helmet, his victims frozen with
terror like deer caught in headlights. If we feel no more for the
victims here than we do in any other slasher, it is nevertheless the
case that these dark and claustrophobic tunnels lend an uncommon tension
to the final stalk-and-kill sequence.
This sequence also
highlights something else about My Bloody
Valentine that
helps to set it aside from the mass of the era’s slashers, and which may
in fact be the reason why the film still seems to be held in such
affection. Although superficially as formulaic as any of its brethren,
My Bloody Valentine
manages, on more than one occasion, to spring a surprise. Perhaps the
biggest of these is the script’s abandonment of what, even by as early
as mid-1981, were the rules
of the slasher film: My Bloody Valentine
has no Final Girl. Oh, there’s a girl amongst those who last the longest
against the pickaxe of the killer, sure enough, but the story never
becomes the kind of one-on-one confrontation that even at this stage of
the game, the audience had surely come to expect. Then, too, there is
the killer’s choice of victims. While it’s true that we never learn
what, exactly, the woman of the prologue did to bring her fate upon
herself, the reasoning behind the other killings is clear enough. Mabel
Osborne gets it for having the temerity to revive the Valentine’s dance;
the others, for similarly ignoring all warnings that no Valentine’s
party is to be held – and for invading the mines. There seems no concern
on the part of the killer with the gender of his victims, and the film
as a whole is refreshingly free of the have-sex-and-die cliché that,
unwittingly or not, taints so many slasher films. Two sets of couples
do
get theirs after having snuck away from the party, true (and the ol’
two-backed shish kebab makes another appearance here, although in such a
cut form that you can actually miss
it!), but there is a sense that they were as much seeking a little time
alone together as an opportunity for carnality. (Perhaps I can best
praise My Bloody Valentine’s
attempts to break free of the mould by saying that when these scenes did
finally make an appearance, I was a little
disappointed….)
As for the rest of it, My Bloody Valentine
boasts some imaginative kills, like the shower-head impalement, and a
couple of fabulous gross-out moments (one involving a candy-box heart
and a pack of roving dogs, the other a pot of boiling frankfurters) –
while it is almost an hour into the film before
any
of the characters do anything that is recognisably slasher-film-stupid.
That must be some kind of record, surely?
But yes, it
is
true that My Bloody Valentine
finally succumbs to the lure of the moronic contrivance – although even
this is surrounded by a couple of moments of unusual common sense. It
speaks volumes for the sheer idiocy of slasher films generally that a
single sensible action by a character in one of them could catch the
attention so firmly, but so it is in My
Bloody Valentine.
When human hearts start turning up in candy-boxes, they are accompanied
by warnings that the Valentine’s dance must be cancelled –
or else.
So the Mayor and the Chief of Police cancel the dance.
I’ll just say that again,
shall I, to give it a chance to sink in? The authorities are warned that
if they don’t cancel the dance, more people will die. So they cancel it.
Yes, yes. I know, I know.
Take a couple of deep breaths: it helps.
Of course, while doing the
cancelling, Chief Newby naturally makes the decision to conceal the real
reason, so that they don’t “end up with a hell of a panic on our hands”.
Do
people in authority really conceal murders as often as they do in the
movies, I wonder? – and how exactly would you go about doing it?
Particularly in a town this
small. Anyway--- Contemplating the fact that Harry Warden may actually
have made good his long-standing threat, the Chief justifies the
cancellation by calling it a mark of respect for Mabel Osborne, whose
death he puts down to “a heart attack” – which it was, I guess, in a
sense. Unfortunately, this explanation leaves the town’s young adults
disinclined to listen. They’re sorry enough about Mabel, but they don’t
see why they should miss out on their party, particularly when it’s the
first to be held in so many years. So they decide to have a party of
their own. This is perhaps the time to correct a common misconception
about My Bloody Valentine:
I’ve seen a number of reviews that insist that the characters hold their
party in
the mine; when in fact they
hold it in the recreation room at
the mine, which is rather different. Of course, those of us watching
recognise that the killer has just been issued with an invitation to the
dance, so to speak; but in the characters’ defence, they don’t
know
there’s a killer around. So we can forgive them for this, if not for
what happens next: half a dozen or so of the party-goers decide to take
a ride down into the mine. The supposed motivation for this (other than
the copious quantities of Moosehead that have been consumed) is the
desire of one of the girls, Patty, to take her friend Sarah’s mind off
her romantic troubles – because nothing says “fun” like a midnight trip
into a coal mine, right? (We learn at this stage that there is a blanket
ban on women in the mine. One on morons would have been more to the
point.) Meanwhile, above ground, the killer has been busy. The discovery
of the first wave of bodies follows, with the characters
again
doing something you wouldn’t expect: they call the cops, and get the
hell out of there – all except for T.J. and Axel who, hearing that some
of their friends, Sarah included, are down in the mine, put aside their
differences and go to the rescue, only to end up trapped down there as
the result of sabotage…. The final section of
My Bloody Valentine
is, as I have indicated, quite a lot of gruesome fun, even in its
neutered form. The film culminates with the revelation of the killer’s
identity, and with a ridiculously brief, almost perfunctory flashback
that “explains” the killing spree, before the killer himself vanishes
into the darkness of the mines, joining Harry Warden in the realms of
legend….
Although generally less
afflicted by “Huh!?” moments than many of its comrades,
My Bloody Valentine
doesn’t quite manage to avoid this common slasher film complaint. Along
with the usual problems – Offscreen Teleportation©, elaborate
“find the body” set-ups in situations that the killer couldn’t possibly
have predicted – the main hiccup is surely the content of the defining
flashback, in which Harry Warden returns to town a year after his
descent into madness to find the two supervisors who were responsible
for the tragedy still occupying the same positions – rather than, say,
serving a lengthy stretch for manslaughter. Hard to believe that any
mining community could be quite
so forgiving of criminal negligence ending in multiple fatalities. Then
we have the handling of the “legend” of Harry. Happy’s ominous recital
in the bar is met with guffaws of laughter and significant taps of the
forehead, a strange reaction considering that he is describing something
that not only demonstrably happened within the lifetime of every
character in the film, but which must surely have been a defining event
in the history of this small town. I suppose we might infer that the
laughter is directed only at Happy’s insistence that Harry returns to
town each year on Valentine’s Day; but still, it seems an unlikely
reaction from a group of miners towards the description of a mining
accident caused by the carelessness of senior staff. Where
My Bloody Valentine
really trips itself, though, is in ultimately revealing that the killer
has a connection to those events of twenty years ago. Now, while no-one
is aware that this particular person is the killer, they
must
know of that connection – yet no-one hesitates to tell the tale, to
ridicule
the tale, in front of him! Of course, the film-makers couldn’t afford to
have the killer react to any of this – and the people who
do
react are very clearly our red herrings – but to have him guffawing away
with the crowd is a little bit extreme. However, most of this is only
apparent after the event.
Reading back over what
I’ve written, I feel as if I’m coming across as a little
too
enthusiastic over My Bloody Valentine.
Still, that’s the thing about reviewing slasher movies, isn’t it? – you
do tend to lower the bar. But I think it is
true that this film is rather better than average. The writing isn’t
brilliant, and nor is the acting, but the work is competent all round; a
number of the cast members have gone on to successful if not brilliant
careers. (That said, the surprise package is Neil Affleck, who ended up
directing episodes of The Simpsons
and The Family Guy.)
I particularly like
some of the by-play between the characters of T.J. and Axel. If the
whole love-triangle set-up is too familiar to be interesting, there are
a scattering of effective moments when the two young men, briefly
forgetting that they hate each other’s guts, behave towards one another
like the close friends they clearly were before everything went wrong.
Paul Kelman (who looks unnervingly like the love-child of Ian McShane
and Rufus Sewell) also does well in the scene in which T.J. must explain
himself to Sarah, conveying the numbing sense of humiliation with which
his failed attempt to make it on his own has left him. The premise of
My Bloody Valentine
has some originality about it (which would last all of nine months, at
which point it would be ripped off wholesale by
The Prowler);
and if we can’t judge the special effects in their entirety, at least
what remains is enjoyably gruesome. In a genre field in which anything
better than total failure is something to be celebrated,
My Bloody Valentine
stands out for hovering between the genuinely entertaining and the
surprisingly painless – and besides: any film that craps all over
Valentine’s Day is okay by me.
Well. Except for
Valentine.
Obviously.
Want a second opinion of My Bloody Valentine? Visit
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