There’s something so slasher-movie old-fashioned going on here in how the first victims are the ones who’re having sex when they shouldn’t be, in how the killer isn’t interested in drawing out suffering like we see in today’s torture porn but just wants to dispatch his victims as quickly as possible. It’s brutally graphic—both the nudity and the gore—but still: It brings (for a while) a kind of cheesy charm to the below-lowbrow proceedings.
Those proceedings? There’s a mad gasmask-wearing homicidal maniac on the loose in the mining town of Harmony, who is either the reincarnation of the mad gasmask-wearing homicidal maniac who went on a murderous rampage 10 years earlier, or a copycat. The cast, refugees from CW network soap operas with a smattering of has-beens (hey, it’s that dude from Emergency!) get picked off at a regular clip, or hang on to maintain their red-herring status.
Who is the killer? When I was ready to send Valentine away with a small gold star, I was going to deploy an approving Scooby-Doo reference, as a way to acknowledge its deep ludicrousness. But I can’t do that now, because the joke I would have made would actually give away that secret. It seems that screenwriters Todd Farmer and Zane Smith (working from the script for the 1981 film of the same name of which this is a nominal remake) didn’t realize that their “clever” ending is straight outta old cartoons about stoner detectives who solve mysteries, and director Patrick Lussier (White Noise 2) isn’t clever enough to pull off this “twist” without realizing he should at least have been ironic about it. Ruh-oh!
My Bloody Valentine 3-D
*
Directed by Patrick Lussier
Rated R
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