My Bloody Valentine

The early 80's were awash in holiday-adjacent slasher movies. You name a holiday, it got movie with a masked killer stalking people with some kind of sharp implement. Valentine's Day is perfect for such a set-up, since it ties in slasher movies' other crucial element: sex. So it's a shame then that the whole of this movie is so much lesser than the sum of its parts. There's a lot to admire about the different choices MBV makes. You have a small mining town setting and mining tunnels, rather than an isolated summer camp or middle America suburban area. The cast are twenty-somethings, not teenagers. The police aren't bumbling idiots, but actually try to get ahead of the situation. The killer even taunts them with messages, warning them to shut down the town's Valentine's Day party. And, in what could only be called a reverse-Jaws, the authorities listen (although the youth still throw another one)! And there's a love triangle between two men and a woman, and at one point, the woman shows some agency and tells them they're both acting like idiots. It's refreshing to see a woman remind men she's not a prize to be won like a stuffed animal at a fair. But the script is TERRIBLY boring. The characters are thin -- I couldn't tell you a thing about any of them, and I may remember two of their names, and I just finished watching it 5 minutes before writing this., The dialogue is flat and meandering, and outside of the main "story" and the love triangle, there's nothing to this movie. Just a lot of spinning wheels. Don't even get me started on how this movie LOVES expository dialogue and flashback scenes that grind the forward momentum -- which is already moving at a snail's pace -- to a halt. And oh, that story. The movie's 40 years old, so screw it, I'm spoiling it. The movie spends the entire runtime telling you the identity of the killer, only in the last five minutes to do an about-face and say "no, the killer is REALLY one of the guys in the love triangle". It's a needless twist that just makes you ask why. The movie was never built as a whodunit, so changing the identity doesn't reframe the movie's narrative. It just feels like a twist for the sake of it. All in all, a dull movie where good ideas are weighted down by a script as lethargic as a glacier. Also, if you watch it, find the uncensored version. The censored version currently on Hulu is so bloodless, it robs the movie of the one thing that might give it any life, being the kills. Hooptober 2021 movie #12/24.