hatchet ii [2010]

if you think i've stopped watching really bad movies, think again! i love films, i love the cinema, i really love horrible movies and this turd is truly awful. how so? let me begin.

21st century scream queen -- and real cutie -- danielle harris stars as a young woman who escaped the evil clutches of a deformed, mutant, bloodthirsty killer nestled in a louisiana swamp. her family was massacred and she vows revenge.

the following night she enlists the aid of rev. zombie, a swindler and tour guide of these same swamps, assayed by the stately tony todd. zombie knows that there is a curse in that swamp. a curse that visits the deformed, mutant, bloodthirsty killer known as victor crowley upon the innocent and soon-to-be-dead. he figures if he can break the curse and kill crowley the swamp will be open for tours again.

zombie enlists the help of a few locals armed to the teeth to help dispatch crowley. little do the locals know that they are really fodder for crowley to kill off so that zombie can get harris to bring a relative of hers so that relative can get killed by crowley. why? something about harris' family starting the curse and it can only end when the killer can exact revenge.

well now here we go. the writer/director adam green sure does love his horror, particularly 1980s slasher flicks. what is the sound of one reel changing. because by the end of the first reel we get the first kill all in splatterific red. the fx are this side of cheap but they are imaginative. no suspense, no tension, no duh. each extra is rounded off like so many third grade sums.

crowley is played by some big dude named kane hodder whose long career of playing bogeymen include the nefarious jason voorhees of the friday the 13th films. in this stretch you'd think the ugly off of crowley would be enough to scare his victims to death. nope. need more? yep. got power tools? check. got electric sander? check. got a chainsaw? check. got a big-assed humongous chainsaw? check check. now crowley's good to go.

tony todd is really a magnificent presence, i think, even when playing bad guys in cheap horror movies. it's his character's hubris that is his downfall. crowley and todd go mano a mano. if filmmaker green didn't make todd's death so easy then perhaps he wouldn't have very much feet of film left over to shoot our final girl's tet a tet with crowley. she does get mediaval on the monster's ass.

is that the end? i'm not sure if the curse is lifted. i don't care. nor do i care about this being a sequel. it was the number two in the title that gave that away, didn't it. this is low budget filmmaking at both its finest and its worst. filmmaker adam green is a fanboy at heart and all fanboy's tastes are circumspect. to love the horror genre is also to love some crap-awful movies. oh what the hell. that bad taste will wash out in a few days. in the mean time i'm going to get another beer.