USA, 2010
Review:
JA Kerswell
Adam Green takes the redneck ALIENS (1986) route with his belated follow-up to his 2006 slasher comedy hit. Continuing directly on from the events of the previous night, the survivor returns to the swamp with a rag-tag group of mercenaries to kill the ghostly monster Victor Crowley once and for all. It certainly has its moments; featuring a bloody avalanche of crowd-pleasing gore, but the wit of the first film is largely missing in the bloody melee.
Marybeth (Danielle Harris replacing Amara Zaragoza) is the lone survivor of the swamp tour that ran afoul of Victor Crowley - the Bayou legend that ended up all too real. She escapes Crowley’s clutches and takes refuge in the house of a local man, Jack Cracker (played by director and sfx legend John Carl Buechler in just the first of the film’s stunt genre casting). Upon discovering who her father was (she had taken the tour to find him), Cracker kicks Maybeth out of his house; rightly fearing the wrath of the bayou’s boogeyman.
Marybeth returns to New Orleans, seeking out tour operator and voodoo practitioner Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd in a welcome return); she tells him that everyone else has been brutally murdered - although for some reason neglects to tell the police. When he finds out her last name, Zombie says that her father was one of the three kids who caused the fire that resulted in Victor Crowley’s death all those years ago. Marybeth makes clear that she still intends to go back and retrieve the bodies of her father and brother. Zombie gathers a group of local mercenaries and offers anyone who can bring back the head of Victor Crowley $5,000 as a bounty. He figures that chopping off his head will be the only way to put Crowley’s spirit to rest and finally stop the killing spree.
The group set off back into the swamp, but the unfriendly ghost is waiting for them double-sided hatchet in hand …
2006’s HATCHET was a riotously entertaining splatterfest with its envelope-pushing gore and likeable characters. Green definitely got the memo with regards to sequels - go big or go home. The ALIENS comparisons are warranted and very probably intentional - albeit with a much smaller budget. The sequel has more action and more gore - but certainly less heart.
Reportedly, Harris had auditioned for the role of Marybeth during the casting of the first film. However, back then Green thought that as it already featured genre legends Tony Todd and Kane Hodder, using another genre star would be too distracting for the audience. He wholeheartedly jettisoned this concern to stock the sequel with cameos and extended roles of some very recognisable faces - everyone from Troma supremo Lloyd Kaufman to writer/director Tom Holland (of CHILD’S PLAY (1988) fame) and A.J. Bowan (the year before YOU’RE NEXT (2001)). Whilst this is certainly a confection box of fun for horror fans, it does sometimes risk feeling a little self-congratulatory and indulgent.
With all the horror celebs needing their moment to shine in the sequel, it sometimes feels like Victor Crowley is a bit player in his own movie for its first half. That relative slow burn was warranted in HATCHET because the characters and the audience were on a journey together to discover if there was any truth to the legend. The humour in the first film, albeit pretty broad, felt organic. Here it feels a little forced and is amped up so much that it does mean that the film doesn’t really generate any sustained suspense until its closing 30 minutes.
Danielle Harris had previously worked around the peripheries of horror since her days as the child actress pursued by Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988) and HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1989). Here she gets to play the lead and is pretty good in a difficult and unglamorous - if not particularly well-written - role. However, due to a physical tick, one of her eyebrows is raised higher than the other in a number of scenes so much so that it becomes distracting and it really is something that the director should have spotted and addressed for the actress’s sake. Harris replaced Amara Zaragoza, who played Marybeth in the first film. Green suggested some bad blood between them resulted in the switch. He told MTV news just before the sequel hit theatres: “The simple answer is that it wasn't gonna work out. I think she was taking some bad advice in handling herself in a bad way with us.” He added: “We had this whole storyline planned out and were going to start the movie on the same frame the other one ended on. We were like, "Do we change all of that because this pretty much unknown actress is being difficult right now?"
So instead we thought "How do we go upwards and onwards and recast her with somebody the fans are going to be even more excited about?”"
Of course, where HATCHET II really excels is with its staggering amount of practical gore effects. Somebody is decapitated whilst having sex and keeps pumping away; two men are chainsawed in tandem and balls first (with said balls plopping to the floor in loving close-up) and someone else is chopped in half and literally pulled inside out by their spine. If Mary Whitehouse had a crystal ball back in the early 1980s her head would have exploded in a SCANNERS’esque shower of viscera just imagining this level of violence would ever appear on a TV or cinema screen. Of course, the violence is so over-the-top it can’t be taken in the least bit seriously by all but the most fervent pearl clutcher. Naturally, Roger Ebert - who never allowed himself to indulge in the sheer joy of a fun slasher movie, predictably trashed it: “There are many good movies opening this weekend. “Hatchet II” is not one of them. Tickets are not cheap and time is fleeting. Why would you choose this one? That’s a good topic for a long, thoughtful talk with yourself in the mirror.”
HATCHET II was filmed in January and February 2010 again in and around New Orleans, Louisiana. The film was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, which was usually considered an albatross around any movie’s neck because newspapers said no to carrying adverts and cinemas often refused to show films with that rating - not to mention it stopped anyone under 17 seeing it. To that end, Green decided to release the movie unrated; which did not stop the AMC chain from pulling it from its theatres across the US. The director said that he considered it a “satiric spoof on so-called torture porn films” - which seems a little odd as HATCHET II doesn’t feature any prolonged scenes of torture. He maintained that the NC-17 rating was unwarranted as - although he admitted the film was very violent - he said it was cartoonish and impossible to take seriously. “There’s not a single act of violence in this that could actually happen”, he told The Muskegon Chronicle in October 2010.
Given that the original HATCHET had been an affectionate throwback to 80s slashers, one of the less desirable comparisons with the sequel was the reviews from mainstream critics who gave the film a mauling even Victor Crowley couldn’t have managed. Roger Moore in The Orlando Sentinel said fans of movies such as HATCHET II:
“… are never, ever dating my daughters.” Roger Moore in the Chicago Tribune threw shade at Green by saying that Alexis Peters had a topless scene written into her contract - as if she had no say in the matter. Rene Rodriguez in The News and Observer also had some shade of her own by trying to dismiss the movie by saying that Green had “… reportedly cranked out the […] script in a week” and ended her review with: “The movie is just inept and dull and stupid - junk being passed off as a guilty, bloody pleasure.” Michael Ordora in the LA Times seemed to be the only critic willing or able to see the film for what it was, saying: “[it] … it doesn’t scare but amuses fans with increasingly ridiculous deaths.”
HATCHET II isn’t quite the hatchet job that the critics made it out to be. There’s something to be said for turning off your brain and just letting the tidal wave of blood and guts to wash over you, but the film does still feel a little half-baked. Maybe it helps if you see it that way.
BODY COUNT 18:
Female 8 / Male 4
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Trailer for HATCHET II