Hatchet

I rented Hatchet because it was tagged as “a return to old school American horror.” Well, they lied. Hatchet was nothing like Halloween, nothing like Friday the 13^th, and nothing like Nightmare on Elm Street. Maybe it’s because I saw the unrated version. Maybe if I had seen the cut version I would have liked it better.

In Hatchet, a group of friends are down in New Orleans for Mardi Gras/Spring Break. The main guy has been recently dumped, so the last thing he wants to do is get a face full of breasts at every turn (all though for the life of me I don’t know why), so instead he drags his best pal along on a swamp boat tour run by an obvious out-of-towner. In the tour group, you have your two ladies who are auditioning for a soft porn movie and their stereotypical slimy director. You have your mom and pop tourists, your mysterious girl, and the two hapless college buddies. These folks think they are in for a haunted swamp tour, but instead they find out some local legends are true.  A crazed hatchet baring deformed psycho really does live there, and he wants their blood.

If you are looking for gore, you will find in it abundance in the unrated version. All I know is that in this day and age, it just looked silly. The spurting limbs reminded me way too much of Monty Python and not enough of Chainsaw. The plot was just ridiculous. Why does everyone feel like they have to explain everything? I like the movie where shit just happens, and who knows why? It’s scarier to not know.

I can’t really put a finger on what it was about this movie that disappointed me, but after renting it, I was sure happy I didn’t spend the 9.99 on it that Best Buy was charging. To me, that says a lot.

Rating: 3 Purrs for a snore-fest that while there were boob shots galore it was missing a soul