Hatchet

You know how sometimes a movie is talked up so much you assume it's going to be crap? And then you buy it because your favorite actor's in it but you don't really want to watch it because you assume it's going to be crap? And then it pops up in Movie Lottery and you have to watch it but you're not expecting much because it's been talked up so much it can't possibly live up to the greatness that everybody claims it is?
That's Hatchet. And I'll get to what I actually thought of it in a moment but first I just want to say that Hatchet and Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon will always be connected in my mind. I first read about them in the same issue of Fangoria (in fact, I think the articles lived right next to each other), they came out around the same time, I think they were both their respective director's first feature (I could be wrong about that one) and they both have Robert Englund in them. And at first I thought they both sounded really good. I was more interested in Behind The Mask and actually ran out and bought it the day it came out. Hatchet I just kind of forgot about.
Until they started putting previews for it on every damn Anchor Bay disc. And I was constantly hearing people talk about how amazing Hatchet is, kept seeing references to how great Hatchet is in all my magazines. Blah blah, Hatchet is amazing.
Sure it is, people. You keep saying that. The more great things I heard, the less I wanted to see it. I don't know why I do that, but the more people tell me something is great the less convinced I am that I'll like it. Maybe I just hate not discovering things for myself. I hate being told what to think, you know?
When all of my friends loved Arrested Development I insisted it looked like a horrible show that I'd hate. A year ago Lauren made me watch the first disc of the first season and I was hooked immediately. I now own the whole series.
Goddamn it, Hatchet was awesome.
A group of tourists go out on a Haunted Swamp Tour in Louisiana and get picked off one by one. It's your basic set 'em up and knock 'em down slasher movie, it was gory as hell, the villain had a sympathetic backstory (he's sort of a southern, swampy Jason Voorhees; he's even played by Kane Hodder!) and all of the "good guys" (also known as the "bait") are actually likeable. Well, varying degrees of likeable. I think poor Mercedes McNab is going to have to play variations on Harmony forever.
Because I connect them in my mind, I sort of feel the need to compare Hatchet to Behind The Mask, even though they're nothing alike apart from both being slasher movies. Behind The Mask is about a guy becoming a slasher movie villain, all the training and planning he has to do. It's a look at the genre from a different angle. But Hatchet is just a straight up old fashioned slasher movie, the kind that probably would've been ignored if it came out in the 1980s when everybody was making this kind of movie. I've never seen an '80s slasher that was this gory, though. (Admittedly, I haven't seen a lot; still working on that.)
And it was really, really nice to see a post-Scream slasher movie where the characters thought about their situation without any of that "following the rules" bullshit. I think that was the main thing I liked about the bait: they thought. They had disagreements and arguments about what the best course of action was, but they didn't all run around willy nilly. They realized something was after them and was going to kill them horribly, so they tried to come up with a plan. Good for them!
I'm glad I finally got around to seeing Hatchet. I really have to stop paying attention when people talk about how great something is, because sometimes they're right.

End of line.
-Sally