Director: George Mihalka
Screenplay: Stephen A. Miller and John Beaird
Starring: Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck, Keith Knight, Howard Landers
Release Date: February 11, 1981
“Roses are red, violets are blue
One is dead, so are you…”
In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, 1981, the town of Valentine’s Bluff is aflutter with excitement as they prepare for their first Valentine’s Day dance in twenty years. What was once an annual tradition was brought to a tragic end when two supervisors at the local coal mine left their posts early to attend the dance, resulting in a methane gas explosion that trapped a group of miners underground. After six weeks of digging, the authorities were only able to turn up one survivor, a man named Harry Warden who in his time underground had gone feral, surviving by feasting on the flesh of his dead comrades. After a stint in a mental health facility, Warden escaped a year later and, donning his miner’s gear and face mask and armed with a pick axe, set about inflicting violent retribution against the two men responsible for what happened, tearing out their hears and placing them in boxes with warnings to the town officials to never again hold a Valentine’s dance.
Mayor Hanninger has decided that it is time for his town to push past it’s violent past, but someone else thinks otherwise. As the night of the Valentine’s dance draws near, he and Chief Newby (Don Francks) begin receiving heart-shaped packages that contain recently removed human hearts, along with warnings to cancel the impending dance. When they comply, a local group of youths, including the mayors son T.J. (Kelman), his ex-girlfriend Sarah (Hallier), Sarah’s new beau Axel (Affleck) and their friends decide to throw a party of their own at the mine where they all work. If only they had listened to that old doomsayer in the bar. Harry Warden is not pleased with their rebelliousness, and as the night wears one he enacts his brutal vengeance upon them one by one.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE is an example of the slasher formula done to perfection. Every hallmark and cliché of the is faithfully adhered to and check off of the list in a spare ninety minute running time, with exactly enough vicious vivisections and puke-inducing pick axe carnage to please any fan of the genre. You’ve got your local urban legend of a holiday-related murderer that the kids don’t believe, but the authorities all secretly know is true. There is, of course, the harbinger of doom, an unreasonably curmudgeonly old bastard who runs the local bar who inexplicably hates young people and constantly warns them that any kind of shenanigans and/or tomfoolery will lead to their well-deserved deaths. And most importantly got your over-sexed young cast who seem to have no worries other than getting drunk and getting laid. Despite the overall familiarity of the proceedings, director George Mihalka and the screenwriters manage to craft an efficient little thriller that certainly breaks no new ground for the genre, but manages to tell it’s tale of bloodshed as effectively as it can without ever losing the audience’s attention.
It helps that they take the time to set up a cast of characters that, despite some hokey dialogue and less than stellar performances, still manage to remain extremely relatable, if not entirely likeable. The lynchpin of the film’s emotional arc (and it is certainly rare for a slasher film to have one of those) is the love triangle and power struggle going on between J.T. and Axel over the affections of Sarah, who was dating J.T. before he skipped town for a year.. Yeah, it’s pretty silly and cliche, but the earnestness of the performers allowed me to overlook that and root for at least some of these guys to make it out alive. The same can be said for the supporting cast who all seem like a real group of friends and all-around genuinely okay people. Unlike the characters in most slasher flicks whom I actively root for the villain to slay as violently as possible, I didn’t want to see any of these folks harmed.
But harmed they are, in spectacular fashion. Harry Warden is one sadistic son of a bitch, dispatching the residents of Valentine’s Bluff in diabolically devious manners, including shoving someone’s face into a pot of boiling hot dogs, stuffing one woman into a dryer set on high, impaling another’s skull on a shower nozzle so that water shoots out of her mouth, and most memorably jamming his pick axe up through one dude’s jaw so that the tip pokes out through their eye socket. The version of MY BLOODY VALENTINE I viewed was the unrated cut, which restores some three minutes of excessive gore trimmed from the film during its’ initial release in order to obtain an R-rating. The footage remained lost until this blu ray was released in 2009 and while the picture quality in this footage is jarringly inferior to the rest of the film, I cannot imagine watching the flick without it. The effects crew obviously poured a lot of loving detail into these scenes, and I honestly feel that the movie wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining without them.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE certainly isn’t a classic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact the ending features a twist that borders on moronic, and the final shot is awkwardly staged and hokey, ending the film on a confusing whimper. However, for what it is, this flick delivers on everything I expected of it, including a somewhat iconic killer, decent characters, and a hefty helping of gory and inventive kills. It ain’t great art, but there’s nothing wrong with eating a little junk every now and then.
My Rating: 6.5/10
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