My Bloody Valentine (1981)

In mid-1980, the slasher subgenre was in full swing, and it came equipped with a handful of motifs: each new entry featured a silent serial killer whose identity was shielded by a mask, they wielded a bladed weapon, targeted their victims over the course of a holiday, and did so typically at a party at which an abundance of sexually active, hard-drinking teenagers gathered at once like moths drawn to light. The movie that popularized these tropes, minus the party aspect, was John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween in 1978, in which a 21-year-old mental patient escapes from an asylum to which he was committed at the age of six for the murder of his older sister on Halloween night and returns to his hometown on the 15th anniversary to stalk and murder a group of teenage babysitters. Two years later, writer Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham adopted the most integral ingredients of Halloween's critical and commercial success while upping the ante for Friday the 13th via increasing the body count, making the setting more isolated, and the antagonist a refreshingly human, middle-aged female. 

Within the same year, the boom of the American slasher continued to flourish with Prom Night, in which a masked killer targets a group of high school seniors at their prom to avenge the accidental death of his little sister, and Terror Train, in which a costumed killer boards a train and slaughters his way through teenagers celebrating New Year's Eve. (As a testament to her career-defining debut as Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis starred in three-fourths of the aforementioned titles.)

When screenwriter John Beaird and director George Mihalka were first commissioned to make their own contribution to the subgenre, the working title for the former's script was The Secret. However, in a transparent effort to cash in on the rapidly thriving trend of the holiday-themed serial killer, the producers decided to change the title to reflect the holiday on which the story transpired, and so the far more memorable and distinctive My Bloody Valentine was born. Unfortunately, while I have no current opinion on Prom Night, Terror Train, or the movie that paved the way for holiday horror, Black Christmas, My Bloody Valentine falls infinitely short of Halloween and Friday the 13th, robbing both films of their most fundamental ingredients (the masked, silent killer striking on a holiday) and, rather than supplying a captivating story populated with memorable, likable, or even original characters, falling back on every cliche in the teen-slasher playbook. 

20 years ago on Valentine's Day, the ridiculously named town of Valentine Bluffs was throwing their annual dance, while seven miners were working at the Hanniger Mining Corporation. The two supervisors abandoned their posts prematurely to attend the dance, neglecting to check the methane gas levels in the tunnels below. In the resulting explosion, the other five miners were buried alive. After six weeks of digging for their bodies, one man emerged as the sole survivor, Harry Warden (Peter Cowper), who achieved his survival by cannibalizing his fellow miners. Rendered insane by the trauma, Warden was committed to a psychiatric hospital, from which he escaped one year later and exacted his vengeance on the two negligent supervisors on Valentine's night. At the annual Valentine's Day dance, heart-shaped chocolate boxes were discovered containing the hearts of the victims, along with a note threatening that more murders would occur should the dance continue. Just like that, an over-100-year tradition was shattered to pieces.

20 years later, the citizens of Valentine Bluffs are preparing for the first Valentine's Day dance since the murders. T.J. Hanniger (Paul Kelman), the son of the mayor (Larry Reynolds), returns to town after a prolonged absence to resume his position at his father's mine and rekindle his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Mercer (Lori Hallier), who is now dating Axel Palmer (Neil Affleck), causing a rift between Sarah's suitors. Following the brutal murder of laundromat owner Mabel Osborne (Patricia Hamilton), accompanied by the discovery of her severed heart in a chocolate box and a threatening note ordering the cancelation of the dance, Mayor Hanniger and Chief Jake Newby (Don Francks) comply with the murderer's demand. However, that doesn't prevent the local devil-may-care youths of Valentine Bluffs from throwing their own impromptu party in the mine, unknowingly provoking the homicidal ire of a man clad in mining gear and wielding a pickaxe. Has Harry Warden escaped once again and returned to town, or has someone else merely adopted his mantle?

Aside from the original attire, weapon, and setting, the plot of My Bloody Valentine is a tedious, uninspired compendium of teen-slasher tropes, emulating the basic template set by Halloween and Friday the 13th: the past tragedy that casts a pall of gloom over a small town, a group of severely horny young adults preparing for the first holiday dance since, thus triggering a string of bloody murders at the hands of a potential Harry Warden impostor, couples sneaking off to have sex, single Pringles isolating themselves in a secluded setting, and getting picked off (or rather pickaxed-off) one by one. An inordinate amount of time is dedicated to an uninvolving love triangle between T.J., Axel, and Sarah that embarrassingly fails to endear us to any of the three protagonists, and the ensuing brawls between T.J. and Axel for Sarah's honor are repetitive, petty, and juvenile. 

The characters are by and large nondescript, obnoxious, and raucous. The male portion consists of young adult miners, and the female portion their girlfriends. Their personalities lack definition, united by a mutual passion for assembling in a bar, playing pool, drinking, having sex, waving their hands at the rules against throwing a Valentine's Day party or going down into the mine after hours, promising to return after one ride on the rail carts. 15 years later, Jamie Kennedy's horror-movie know-it-all, Randy Meeks, would lay out the rules of how to survive a slasher scenario in Scream: rule #1: never have sex, #2: never drink or do drugs, and #3: never say, "I'll be right back," because it's a promise you're nearly destined to break. The loudmouthed morons in My Bloody Valentine cheerfully violate almost every single one of those rules save doing drugs. The only moderately likable character is Hollis (Keith Knight), whose off-putting appearance (overweight, four-eyed, and topped off with a handlebar mustache) is belied by a big-brother-type personality that makes him the unofficial leader of his mining troupe. He comforts T.J. during his time of heartache of losing the woman of his dreams and breaks up one of the many fights between him and his short-tempered rival. 

Beaird's treatment of his female characters is somewhat chauvinistic. When Sarah rejects T.J.'s invitation to a lake, he responds by playfully dragging her by her hand out of a store and shoving her into his car, admitting that he isn't listening to her. Women are explicitly forbidden from entering the mine. To her credit, Patty (Cynthia Dale) is a loyal best friend to Sarah, encouraging her to attend the dance with her and Hollis should she decide against either of her two suitors, and Dale invests her best friend role with charisma and ebullience. However, once she enters the climactic chase portion of the movie, Patty devolves into a pathetic and helpless damsel in distress. As the corpses pile up and the presence of a killer becomes apparent, she sprouts neither a spine nor a survival instinct, resorting to crying and running her hands through her hair in theatrical horror, stubbornly refusing to leave her dead boyfriend's side to save herself, and takes forever to climb a ladder because, naturally, she's terrified of heights. As a result, when Patty bites the dust, her exit engenders indifference. 

Sarah is annoying in her indecision over which suitor to pick. Clearly, she's still in love with T.J. despite harboring resentment over his abandonment of her, but for some reason, she's begun and is committed to a relationship with a much bigger asshole who treats her more like a prized possession than a human being, sometimes speaking on her behalf. At one point, after Hollis breaks up a fight between T.J. and Axel, Sarah breaks down crying into T.J.'s chest before suddenly telling him to leave her alone and melodramatically running off. Once Axel is unmasked as the killer, Sarah's decision becomes substantially easier, and yet she still runs back to her homicidal ex after hearing that he's still alive. If I were T.J., I'd take that as a red flag to search for a new girlfriend.

Speaking of T.J., no explanation is provided for his sudden departure from Valentine Bluffs prior to the events of the movie. Howard is the most annoying and loud offender, snorting beer through a straw and dousing his head and face in fake blood to scare Mabel, who's old enough to suffer a heart attack at such a cruel, childish prank. 

Don Francks and Larry Reynolds add a sprinkle of maturity, determination, and urgency to the otherwise plodding story through their characters' investigation, but Chief Newby and Mayor Hanniger can't help registering as pale imitations of Sam Loomis and Leigh Brackett from Halloween. And if it weren't for a single explanatory speech that reveals the mayor to be the father of T.J., you'd never detect a kinship between them. They aren't given more than a fleeting interaction in which the mayor simply asks T.J. where he's going. Likewise, the bartender (Jack Van Evera), ironically nicknamed "Happy," is a cheap knockoff of Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th, a curmudgeonly doomsayer convinced that Harry Warden has returned to town and advises the beer-guzzling youths against throwing a Valentine's Day party in the mine, a warning that predictably falls on deaf (and soon to be severed) ears. The remaining oversexed couples -- Mike and Harriet, John and Sylvia, Dave and Gretchen -- are merely names, most of whom are on hand to contribute to the body count.

Beaird's dialogue is sporadically atrocious. An early conversation between Mayor Hanniger and Mabel hints at the inciting past tragedy in the most bluntly expository, stilted manner imaginable. As the elderly couple walks down the street, the mayor praises Mabel for all the work she and her decorating committee have done to organize the upcoming Valentine's Day dance. "Well, after all, the first Valentine's dance in 20 years has to be something special," says Mabel. "Uh, yeah, well, uh, of course you're right, Mabel, but I think we'd all be better off if you played down the fact that it's the first Valentine's dance in 20 years. If you know what I mean," replies the mayor portentously. Beaird has such little faith in his audience's intelligence that he feels obligated to restate a crucial piece of plot information in the same exchange through the other character to ensure that we register its significance.

The youthful, party-going miners speak in a manner that's so generic and functional it borders on self-parody. "Well, if we aren't going to have a Valentine's dance, what are we going to do?" "Why don't we have a Valentine party?" proposes Howard. "How about my father's mine, huh?" says T.J. "What a blast!" chimes in Tommy Whitcomb (Jim Murchison in an embarrassingly over-the-top delivery that reeks of a first take). When T.J. advises Hollis against taking women down into the mine, Hollis assures him, "We're going for a quick ride and coming right back up. We're gonna come right back up again. Believe me." You can envision future Randy shaking his head at this character's delusional degree of confidence. When Howard disobeys Hollis' command to watch over Sarah and Patty in the name of self-preservation, Sarah shouts, "Howard, you bastard! You can't leave us like this!" Like what? You and Patty are perfectly able-bodied; grab your shell-shocked, grief-stricken idiot friend and run along with him. 

After editors Gerald Vansier and Rit Wallis cut to a flashback that succinctly elucidates the killer's motive, Mayor Hanniger explains, "My God, it was on Valentine's Day that Harry Warden killed Axel's father." He literally verbalizes something that was visually demonstrated just a moment ago. Again, the filmmakers' lack of respect for their audience's attention span is brazen and insulting. A false-alarm scene in which Sarah runs into Chief Newby while he patrols the nighttime streets is so derivative of Laurie Strode's run-in with Sheriff Brackett that I half-expected Newby to say, "You know, it's Valentine's Day. Everyone's entitled to one good scare."

The final-act reveal of the killer's identity is impressively camouflaged throughout, the screenplay dishing out few hints save an insert shot of an air bubble rising to the surface of water after an off-screen grunt and splash indicate Axel's death. His childhood trauma, on the other hand -- as a little boy, he witnessed Harry Warden stab his father to death with a pickaxe from beneath his bed -- is exploited for a quick, easy psychological motivation. Beaird doesn't explore it with any depth that would prompt sympathy for Axel's grief-fueled disconnect from reality. 

Following in the footsteps of his slasher antecedents, cinematographer Rodney Gibbons adopts the killer's POV to position his audience behind their eyes during stalking sequences, beginning with the killer stalking Mabel from outside the window of her laundromat. Like Michael Myers before him, as the killer skulks through the laundromat, his POV shot is accompanied by heavy breathing through his gas mask. In the subsequent scene, a POV shot appears to be stalking a group of miners outside at night working on a car, only to reveal itself as a false alarm in the form of T.J. sneaking up on an isolated Axel. Regrettably, this first-person technique invariably fails to conjure even a scintilla of suspense because the targets within its view aren't developed anywhere near enough to fear for. Bizarrely antithetical to the no-holds-barred fun of an 80s slasher, Gibbons elects not to linger on his most gruesome posthumous images -- Mabel's burned corpse after falling out of a washing machine or Dave's blotched, peeled face after it was forcibly dunked in a pot of boiling hot dog water -- thus neutering their visceral impact.

It isn't that the kills in My Bloody Valentine are particularly unimaginative in conception so much as they are fatally tame and visually inchoate in presentation. Whenever the killer is about to deliver a sharp blow, editors Vansier and Wallis love to cut away at the precise moment of penetration. Take Mabel's stabbing. Gibbons frames the upraised pickaxe in close-up, and as it plunges down, the editors cut to the next scene. When the killer swings his pickaxe upward into the underside of Happy's chin, the editors quickly cut to the back of the victim's head, concealing the most graphic kill from the camera. A shot of a nail being fired into Hollis' forehead happens too quickly and in too dim a light to discern until a close-up of his face in the aftermath clarifies. A zoom-in on the opening blond victim's screaming mouth (after her back is shoved into an unseen spike) is a blatant rip-off of Claudette Hayes' pre-title freeze-frame kill in the opening of Friday the 13th. 

Although the underground mine is a theoretically poetic setting in which to set the climax of a horror film, doubling as an ideal hangout spot for the party-goers and hunting ground for Harry Warden, Gibbons renders it visually unintelligible, bathing every corner and character in shadows that rob the final reel and confrontations of excitement or tension. 

Director George Mihalka lacks the finesse of John Carpenter or Sean Cunningham to mine the exhilaration that should ensue from a set piece in which the killer chases T.J. and Sarah across a series of rail carts, and he has no idea how to stage a battle between his protagonist and antagonist. As T.J. and the killer go head to head, it looks as though they're gently tapping their weapons against each other's, careful not to hit each other by accident. T.J. and Sarah's trip to the lake plays out like a stupid soap opera, with maudlin piano music playing over the entirety of their melodramatic dialogue which isn't worth listening to anyway. Mihalka's direction is so lifeless and repetitive. Every time Sarah moves away from T.J., he walks up behind her like a psycho, wiping tears from the drama queen's eyes, apologizing for leaving her (without thinking to explain why he felt it was necessary), and professing his undying love for her. 

Mihalka fails to wring suspense out of Beaird's painfully formulaic setups. When John leaves Sylvia alone to get a pack of beers, it's predictable that she's next in line for penetration (and not in the way she intended). When he shows her that pulling a rope brings down jackets from the ceiling, we know the killer is going to use that to his advantage, and his subsequent emotional torment of Sylvia is so sadistic and misogynistic it's actually upsetting. To teach the naysayers a lesson about spitting on the memory of Harry Warden, Happy sets up a prank in which he positions a life-sized replica of Warden inside a lunch room and rigs it to extend a pickaxe when the door is opened. He's so proud of his innovation that he repeatedly opens and closes the door to watch the pickaxe swing out, even after his first test succeeds. Satisfied, Happy turns around and prepares to leave, but then, overcome by the force of screenwriting and directorial contrivance, he turns back for one more test. Obviously, awaiting him in place of the replica is going to be the actual killer. One doesn't have to be well-versed in horror to foresee that.

When John stumbles on the suspended corpse of Sylvia, Mihalka and Gibbons foreground his wide-eyed shock in an over-the-shoulder shot, placing the camera behind Sylvia's head so the only detail we can discern is water spewing out of her mouth. It's a surprising instance of favoring psychological horror over graphic sensationalism. As for Mike and Harriet, their simultaneous murders transpire entirely off-screen during foreplay, revealed only in an aftermath shot of their corpses skewered by what faintly looks like a chain. Again, the dim lighting makes it difficult to discern. 

After receiving a heart-shaped box of chocolates from an anonymous sender, Mayor Hanniger excitedly says to Chief Newby, "If there's one thing I like better than Christmas candy, it's Valentine's candy." But inside this particular box of holiday-themed dead-teenager horror lies an assortment of chocolates that look silky and creamy on the surface, but once bitten into, reveal themselves to be a stale and synthetic imitation of a vastly tastier and more distinctive brand that deserves to be discarded. No, I will not be this movie's bloody valentine. 

4.1/10