How quickly can you realize that you hate a movie? For “Hatchet II,” that moment will probably be delivered in the title sequence, in which a video camera hurriedly ping-pongs around a Louisiana swamp, pausing every few seconds to get a look at the remains of the characters from the first film, 2006’s “Hatchet.” Since most of those actors didn’t return for the sequel (an outstanding decision on their behalf), we’re treated to lumps of Halloween-decoration gore decorated with some distinctive marks (mostly pieces of look-alike wardrobe). This is a clumsy, clunky title sequence for sure and there’s plenty to hate about it. But maybe the most audacious bit of pretentiousness comes with the title itself, here deemed “Adam Green’s Hatchet II.”
If you’re wondering “Who the fuck is Adam Green?” you aren’t alone. Barely known to those outside of lifetime subscribers to Fangoria Magazine, that isn’t enough to stop the man from giving him an identifiable, John Carpenter-esque tag. Even if it’s a reference to the great director of “Halloween,” it’s still really obnoxious.
The first “Hatchet” was an adequate if not-exactly-groundbreaking piece of, to quote the poster, “old school” slasher horror. The basic plot was that a bunch of people, including a pre-“Avatar” Joel David Moore, get lost in the swamps outside of New Orleans and are picked off, one by one, by a deformed bogeyman named Victor Crowley (played, with a certain amount of wink-wink-nudge-nudgery by former Jason Voorhees, Kane Hodder). While there wasn’t a whole lot to love about the first film (it traded in the genre staples of fake tits and rubbery mutilations), the script at least had an undeniable snappiness; a knowingness that never got in the way of its good fun.
This time around, though, knowingness is all the movie has. Early on in the movie there are references to “Frozen,” Green’s atmospherically eerie suspense movie from earlier this year, and “Behind the Mask,” another recent slasher movie that was way more entertaining than “Hatchet.” Tony Todd, the gravel-voiced actor who will forever be known as Candyman, shows up as a voodoo practitioner, a kind of low-rent version of Keith David’s Dr. Facilier from “Princess and the Frog,” and is given the unforgivable task of trying to emote opposite the equally robotic Danielle Harris (Rob Zombie’s “Halloween”), who plays a survivor of the first film that wants to return to the swamp to exact some revenge.
Early sequences that hang lifeless on the screen, including Todd and Harris putting together a “hunting party” to go after the bogeyman, and a prolonged boat ride out to the marsh in which each uninteresting character is given a few lines of dialogue. The casting director seems to have selected actors who came to the audition with the broadest possible hillbilly shtick (strip of hay hanging out of the corner of their mouths, teeth blacked out) and the smallest possible acting ability. Scenes stretch on with eye-rolling asininity, propped up by convoluted back stories about “family curses” and related narrative non-starters. An hour into the movie, and you’re thirsty for a fizzy eruption of blood, if only because it will prove the movie has some life in it.
But even when the blood does flow (and it flows, plentifully) in the movie’s last act, there isn’t enough to make you actually care. And I’m not talking about the loftier ambitions of character development or human emotion. No, we would have settled for a character that made you laugh because they were funny or charismatic or somehow likable in their own shallowness (the way “Cloverfield” often worked). It just goes on and on and on, with the Victor Crowley make-up looking even cheaper and more Halloween mask-ish when shot on the unforgiving format of digital, which here makes the action look like it was choppily captured on a cell phone camera (and no, this is not some stylistic choice).
Supposedly the movie was so hardcore that it’s being released unrated into more than 60 theaters (a figure the publicist helpfully pointed out before the screening, “the largest of any unrated movie since ‘Caligula'”), but you’ll never be able to figure out why, especially in the blood-spattered wake of Alexandre Aja’s delightful “Piranha 3D.” There’s nothing particularly controversial, or in-your-face, about the fountains of gore in “Hatchet II”; they’re just repetitive, unoriginal deaths that could have benefited greatly from even the slightest bit of imagination or wit (this film is painfully unfunny). Since the first “Hatchet,” Adam Green must have spent a lot of time putting together the characters’ back stories, but the actual entertainment value of the film seems to have been forgotten about entirely. For a slasher movie to be released in 2010 without anymore oomph or sophistication or stylistic verve is positively deathly. [F]