“These are his woods.”
If you interact enough with the horror community – on Twitter, or Reddit, or any sort of fan page – someone will inevitably recommend you watch Hatchet. Do not listen to this person. Do not read reviews that call it a “modern classic,” or praise Victor Crowley as this generation’s iconic slasher movie killer. Hatchet is hacky, derivative garbage, and if someone is hissing out red-faced insistence through gritted teeth to the contrary, that person has questionable taste. Ask them their favorite Rob Zombie or Eli Roth movie; they will have one. Sure, the plot of Hatchet is alluring, and it runs a svelte 85 minutes (although it feels much longer), not to mention the cameos from horror film royalty like Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, and Tony Todd. Do not be fooled by this trap. Heed my warning.
Ben (played by Joel David Moore, which is who you called in the early 2000s when Justin Long wasn’t picking up) isn’t having a very good time at Mardi Gras. He’s been dragged there by his friends in an attempt to help him get over being dumped by a longtime girlfriend, but day drinking and vomiting and rampant nudity just aren’t doing the trick. He leaves his friends to go on a haunted swamp tour, with his pal Marcus (Deon Richmond) reluctantly tagging along. Marcus is more or less a quip machine, as if writer/director Adam Green (the far superior Frozen) watched Not Another Teen Movie and thought “That’s excellent dialogue for a Black character.” But he is a good friend to Ben, and their chemistry is the best in the film. It also helps that Moore has pretty solid comic timing.
So far so good, right? Haunted swamp tour in a bayou? Goddamn perfect location for a slasher movie. There’s some fun to be had along the way, with Tony Todd popping up in the film’s funniest scene. When they get to the kitschy tourist shop that handles the boat tours, though, Hatchet goes all the way off the rails. Here is where you get a sense of Green’s god-awful sense of pacing, as unfunny scenes are dragged out to their absolute breaking point, without ever achieving a kind of absurdist ur-comedy. Case in point: in the store is Shapiro (an absolutely awful Joel Murray, who can’t even convincingly play “New Orleans amateur pornographer” in a sleazy way; he just looks bored and tired) filming what seems to a be a Girls Gone Wild knockoff called, sigh, Bayou Beavers. He’s instructing two women to take their tops off and kiss, then has them do it again when he changes camera batteries. Wait, this is a full-on porn? And every scene is just these two going “Woo!” with their shirts off? Huh. Guess you learn about a new fetish every day. It’s pretty low-rent though; it looks like Shapiro is filming with a mini DV camera, which, based on how goddamn cheap everything in Hatchet looks, might have been used to film this as well. (The person I was watching this with was shocked when I told them this came out in 2007.)
We’re forced to endure some more of Hatchet‘s “humor” in the character of Shaun, the inept tour guide. He’s an Asian man speaking with a broad Cajun accent, which is never as funny as the film thinks it is. God help me, it’s a less funny version of a similar offensive joke in That’s My Boy. Hatchet is trying so hard to be funny – and to be honest, some of the moments land, mainly those involving Moore – to the point that it made me question what kind of movie I was watching. I’m not averse to horror comedies, when done right; we’ve covered Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil in this very column. The thing is, those movies are actually funny. What Hatchet winds up as is an incredibly gory slasher with a lot of dreadful jokes.
The slasher in question is Victor Crowley, the deformed son of a swamp-dwelling hermit who was accidentally set on fire before getting a hatchet buried in his face. That’s not a bad origin story (even if the deformity = evil trope is pretty suspect in the year 2021), but Hatchet butchers that too (no pun intended). The problem with Crowley is that he looks, well, fucking ridiculous. He’s like a grumpy melted candle. No, wait, he’s a yoked version of the inbred kid from the cover of The Hills Have Eyes. Oh, wait, I got it: he looks almost exactly like the bad guy at the end of The Mask when he puts on the mask. Generally speaking, your audience shouldn’t be laughing at your big bad monster. The fact that Victor is played by Kane Hodder, Jason Voorhees himself, only serves to underline how much Hatchet cribs from Friday the 13th, a movie that sucks. Oh wait, I got another one: Victor looks like the kind of monster you’d design if you skipped Monster Design 101 to go chug thermometers in the parking lot.
The performances, by and large, are dreadful. Moore is the standout here; it’s a very, very, very low bar, but in spite of that he is genuinely watchable. Richmond isn’t nearly as funny as the script thinks Marcus is (I guess to the film’s credit, the Black guy doesn’t die first). Murray is horrendous, which is a shame considering he has actual chops (he was Freddy Rumsen on Mad Men). Mercedes McNab plays Misty, one of Shapiro’s starlets, and she’s supposed to be the personification of a dumb blonde joke, but the movie takes it way too far. She double-checks the number for 911, thinks “police” and “cop” are two different things, and at one point literally doesn’t know left from right. She’s not vapid; she’s literally too stupid to exist. Medically speaking, she is soup.
I won’t say that Hatchet has good scares, because it doesn’t, but there are some nice practical effects on display (Victor Crowley’s laughable design notwithstanding). The kills are inventive and numerous, although if you want to get nit-picky – and I do – only one person is killed with a hatchet. It’s all just so much sound and fury, though, and there were more times than I can count when I wondered if Hatchet was a parody of slashers or just one made with a staggering level of ineptitude. I’m going with the latter. This even extends to ripping off the final shot of Friday the 13th, in a scene that’s too stupid to be an homage but hacky enough to be there because Adam Green only knows visual storytelling through the lens of other films.
When I wrote about Green’s Frozen, I ended by saying that Green is someone to pay attention to. I retract that. Ignore Adam Green and ignore this stupid, stupid franchise, which has recently entered the reboot stage, with 2017’s Victor Crowley. This is a franchise by and for people who want only the surface level of horror, just gore and viscera without any meaning, nuance, or artistry. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ten times the film this is, and it’s more violent without spilling a drop of blood on screen. I’m not just saying that Hatchet doesn’t live up to TCM – what could? I’m saying that Hatchet is a waste of goddamn time. You’d be better off watching nothing than watching this.
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