Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 28, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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“It’s not a remake,” states the poster for Hatchet—a declaration that completely misses the point, given how intentionally and determinedly retro the movie is. From start to finish, Hatchet is a love letter to the stalker/gore films of the late ’70s and early ’80s, following the formula to a T—to the point where it could in fact be easily mistaken for a redux of a vintage slice-and-dicer. The movie could have stepped right out a time machine from the heyday of slasher cinema, as writer/director Adam Green has eschewed any attempt to gloss it up or update the subgenre’s themes, and that winds up being both its blessing and its curse.
The setting is New Orleans during Mardi Gras for the first reel or so, before a motley crew of victims-to-be head out for a nighttime “haunted swamp tour” right where a deformed killer named Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder) lurks. The band of time-honored types includes Ben (Joel David Moore), an awkward young guy reeling from a recent breakup; his wisecracking African-American buddy Marcus (Deon Richmond); Marybeth (Tamara Feldman), a quiet woman with a secret agenda; Misty (Mercedes McNab) and Jenna (Joleigh Fiorevanti), both sexy and dumb as a box of rocks; full-of-b.s. tour guide Shawn (Parry Shen); and a few token older people. Fortunately, Green has a knack for amusing characterizations and dialogue, so it’s fun to spend time with this bunch, who are played by an engaging cast. Moore makes an appealingly gawky hero out of a role that could have turned annoying, Richmond gets some good laughs (though his horny/cowardly-black-guy part is the one that could have most stood a touch of revisionism) and Buffy/Angel veteran McNab sheds her TV inhibitions and her top with enthusiasm.
Of course, the group ignores the warnings by a deranged swamp rat to stay out of the swamp. Of course, Marybeth doesn’t inform anyone about Crowley’s legend until they’re stranded in his territory. And once Crowley makes his disfigured presence known, they start getting bumped off in pretty much the order we expect them to. Needless to say, Green isn’t subtle with his horrors; we get a good look at Crowley when he claims his very first victim, and the blood flows copiously and convincingly. Makeup FX creator John Carl Buechler, freed from the restrictions of Charles Band-size budgets, delivers his best, most visceral work in a while; a few of the murders directly recall the MPAA-truncated kills in his Friday the 13th Part VII, as if he took the opportunity to stage ’em right this time.
Trouble is, everything in this movie recalls a Friday the 13th sequel, and if you’ve seen a few of those films, you’ve pretty much seen this one. Familiarity may not breed contempt here, but it certainly works against any true surprises or dramatic interest. There’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker evoking the spirit of the movies he grew up enjoying, but there are no fresh ideas added to the mix here, and as a result the movie’s pleasures remain on the surface. You may laugh at the characters’ dialogue, but little real empathy is built for them; the movie packs a few solid jumps, but true suspense is lacking. And—spoiler alert, but not really—when two surviving characters are seen drifting in a rowboat near the film’s end, thinking the terror is over, is there anyone watching who won’t know what’s coming next?
There are bonuses for fright fans in the form of fun cameos by Robert Englund, Tony Todd and Blair Witch Project’s Joshua Leonard, and a dramatic one by Hodder, showing his real face and getting to play real emotion as Crowley’s father in the flashback before bringing his menacing physicality to the prosthetically enhanced role of the grown-up marauder. Andy Garfield’s score has the right synthesized sound to recall the music that accompanied many slasher flicks back in the day. Yet in so slavishly replicating all these decades-old details, Hatchet never has a chance to establish an identity of its own. There will no doubt be many die-hard stalker fans who will revel in the nostalgia that this movie elicits, but there’s something kinda regressive about a film whose most potentially appreciative audience will be people who have already seen a dozen or more movies just like it.
