Given that it’s a slasher movie set in the unlikely environment of mining, it’s appropriate that My Bloody Valentine 3D eventually collapses. Starts off pretty strong, though. You’d have to be pretty square to deny the pleasures of the newspaper-headline opening credits, the laugh-out-loud over-the-top grand guignol gore effects (which start almost right away), and of course the full-frontal nude 3D chase scene, which more than anything else is why I decided to see this movie in the theater. As a manly movie aficionado par excellence, how could I not? All that kind of stuff is what makes MBV3D the perfect manly movie in the early going–it’s designed to make you crack up and cheer at the screen, ogle the sessy ladies and guffaw at the carnage.
But before long it taps that vein of trashy gold dry, and starts alternating between increasingly monotonous chase scenes and kills (which occasionally cross some weird lines–killing a pregnant girl? reserving the worst corpse desecration for the completely innocent bit-part Latina housekeeper? menacing a kid for no good reason and never following up on it?) and gritted-teeth dramatic scenes that I promise you the audience is not there to see. Folks, I’ve sat through enough manly movies to know which ones will end up making a roomful of drunk dudes start nodding off, and after about the first third of this movie, enter sandman. Meanwhile, the film’s engaging whodunit storyline, which at first seemed like a promising crossbreeding of the silmilar elements from Scream with a straightforward, non-ironic modern slasher vibe, ends up resorting to a Jeph Loeb-style twist-cum-cheat that leaves you feeling like you wasted your time in trying to figure it out. And the less said about the sequel-whoring ending, the better. (Least scary psychopath ever?)
Finally, I suppose this goes without saying, but this movie in no way manages nor even attempts to truly frighten or horrify. I’m sure no one stumbled into My Bloody Valentine 3D expecting the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, let alone The Exorcist, but yeah, this is your basic amusement-park ride horror movie. And hey, there’s a place for that! It’s nothing to apologize for! Now, I may not be the target horror-fan audience for it necessarily–unless you count antecedents like Texas Chain Saw, Psycho, and Peeping Tom, which I don’t think you should, or things like Scream and American Psycho that are as much satires as slashers (slashtires?), this marks a grand total of four slasher films I’ve ever seen; the others were Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, neither of which did I care for or find terribly frightening, and Slumber Party Massacre 2 in a Manly Movie Mamajama-mandated, and that’s truly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But I’m certainly open to wall-to-wall slayfests in an action movie format, like Doomsday or Crank or Invasion U.S.A., and I’ve watched that montage of all the kills from Friday the 13th enough to know that I’m open to the idea of slasher flicks as a rip-roarin’ good time at the movies, watching a masked killer hack his way through some naked kids and grizzled old dudes. The thing is that that’s what your movie has to deliver, from start to finish, and this one didn’t. Would it still be fun to watch in a big drunk group, even if it’s naptime after a while? Sure. I’m sure we’d all wake up for the next flick anyway. But I’d kind of like to be kept awake the whole time.
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