Hatchet (2006)

[runningscared]

Movie: Hatchet (2006), directed by Adam Green

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 6.00 miles, 9’21”/mile, 00:56:08 (short recovery run)

 

Welp, I did it again: I ran too many consecutive nights outside on the pavement (this time, six) and jangled m’bones around a bit more than the ol’ joints could handle. I now have a much more visceral understanding of the term “bone jelly,” but I regret nothing! We had a warm snap, and I couldn’t countenance wasting November nights in the mid-50s what with Pandemic Winter about to chain me to my treadmill for months to come. Trust me—I ran on a treadmill literally every single night of June, and if I see an opportunity to put off spending another month that way, you better believe I’m going to risk it.

 

On the plus side, while I’m recovering from a few mild overtraining injuries, at least I get to sink my eye-teeth into a handful of scary movies while I do my recuperative penance jogs on the Never-Ending Belt. For my first night back in, I opted for Hatchet, Adam Green’s 2006 love letter to the classic slashers of the early ’80s. I saw it once or twice nearer to when it came out, and I remember having experienced an odd mix of disappointment and delight, though I was fuzzy on the details. I’m pleased to report that I apparently haven’t changed much across the intervening years, because I still find Hatchet to be a flawed but ultimately gleeful caper that’s earned the love it gets from genre fans.

 

The plot is easy-access but not so simple your brain slides off it: Ben and Marcus are in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but Ben is still smarting from a breakup and not in a partying mood. Marcus reluctantly agrees to leave the festivities and accompany Ben on a haunted swamp tour. When the unqualified tour guide sinks their boat and one of the group is injured by a gator, their night goes from bad to worse. And when local sorta-dead hatchet-to-the-face murderbot Victor Crowley shows up and starts literally tearing members of the stranded tour group to pieces, well, that’s maybe rock-bottom. Does Marybeth, Ben’s new tour-crush and local bad-ass, know enough about Crowley that they can use to survive?

 

I gotta say, if you’re a particular kind of horror fan, there is LOTS to like about Hatchet: inventive deaths, two metric tons of gore lovingly rendered sans CGI, cameos by horror icons Robert “Freddy” England and Tony “Candyman” Todd, and palpable love for the genre just spraying all over the place as if from a severed artery. Clearly Adam Green made the movie he always wanted to see. Add to that a genuinely funny script in which the humor isn’t the entrée but a really great side dish, and Hatchet is already better than the average slasher flick.

 

On top of that, I have to give Hatchet some extra credit points for two extremely personal reasons, to wit: 1) Adam Green is a local boy and saw fit to outfit Ben in a Newbury Comics t-shirt, and seeing the Tooth Face logo always makes me smile; and 2) somehow I had forgotten that Mercedes McNab is in this! Yup, Harmony from Buffy plays Misty, a character who, like Harmony, is extremely dumb, but unlike Harmony, is also frequently topless. So if you want to see Alternate Timeline Harmony in which she left Sunnydale before the whole vampire apocalypse thing and wound up doing the equivalent of Girls Gone Wild videos, this is your chance.

 

That said, Hatchet is far from perfect: sometimes the frat-boy humor wears a little thin, and while I appreciate the characters all being given at least enough backstory to keep them from being just axe-fodder, I kind of feel that it was both not enough about the main characters to make me really care about them and too much about everyone else so the story took a while to get moving. Also, while I understand that it’s an homage to a formula, that doesn’t mean seeing yet another instance of said formula isn’t at least a little wearing. Meanwhile, Hatchet isn’t actually very scary. Partly that’s because we’ve all seen this stuff a zillion times before—the unkillable loner who rips interlopers to shreds—but it’s also because the jump scares just rely on loud sounds and Victor Crowley himself is pretty uninspiring as a franchise Big Bad. He’s little more than a repackaged and transplanted Jason Voorhees minus the hockey mask.

 

And yet, Hatchet is ultimately more than its shortcomings might imply. I may be reading too much into it, but all the bro humor and gratuitous nudity seems self-parodic, or at least self-aware. It’s not just mindlessly checking items off a list; you can really sense how much fun people had putting this together. So I think of Hatchet less as a scary movie and more as a celebration of scary movies, the kind of flick that will entertain horror fans and make them smile, cheer, and groan, if not necessarily scream. 

 

Sadly, Amazon Prime has only the R-rated version of Hatchet and its sequels available for streaming, which runs counter to the franchise’s whole point of bathing in the craziest excesses of the gore-soaked ’80s, but unless you’ve seen the uncut version, trust me: you’re not going to come away from the R-rated print thinking “well, that seemed restrained.” If you like slashers and somehow missed Hatchet the first time around, give it a go. Despite its missteps, it delivers what Newbury Comics’s slogan promises: “a wicked good time.”