MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981, 2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is definitely one of the most iconic eighties slashers, thanks to the memorable image of a killer garbed in mining-gear and wielding a pickaxe. This is a fair accomplishment, since VALENTINE appeared in theaters before Jason Voorhees made his first canonical appearance in FRIDAY 2, and before Michael Myers enjoyed his second outing. This means that the writers had a strong sense of one basic appeal of the slasher HALLOWEEN had established: that of the masked killer.

Director George Mihalka and the writers, however, structure VALENTINE more like a mystery, complete with red herrings. The setup is efficiently established in the mining-town of Valentine Bluffs: twenty years ago, on the night of a popular Valentine's Day dance, five miners were buried by a cave-in thanks to the owners' negligence. One miner, Harry Warden, survived and murdered not only the owners, but other victims in order to set down an edict: that others will die if the city ever holds another Valentine's dance. And despite the fact that Warden is captured and sent away to an asylum, for twenty years there are no dances. Then the custom is re-instituted in 1981-- and people start dying. Did Warden escape captivity, just like Myers in HALLOWEEN?

Whereas Myers' mask does not hide his true identity, it's soon clear that Warden's not the culprit, just by the way other characters act suspiciously. However, the killer is just as much a victim of trauma as Warden, and so there's a loose continuity between the two. At the film's end the association is made stronger by the way the copycat disappears into the bowels of the mine, suggesting that even if his body is found, he'll be as much of a spectre of doom as his predecessor. Sadly, only the killer proves interesting, and all the other characters are ciphers. There are some decent gore scenes but nothing to stand with the best death-FX.

Released as a 3D movie, the VALENTINE remake, directed by Patrick Lussier, quite naturally does not try to sell the same mystery to consumers who probably already know the original's plot. Thus various names from the original movie are kept but the roles are changed and/or rearranged. Thus male lead Jensen Ackles takes his name, Tom, from the original but is mostly a different character. His father, now deceased, was one of the townsfolk victimized ten years ago by crazed Harry Warden, and Tom returns to the town (renamed "Harmony") purely to sell the mines to the highest bidder. 

I didn't care for a long sequence where Lussier shows the original killer knocking off various victims, but the director made up for it by a well-choreographed scene in which The New Killer picks on a couple who just had a motel hookup. I was very surprised to see an extended nude scene with a gorgeous female in a 21st-century film, since at the very least the whole scene would have to be cut for commercial TV prints.

Tom was formerly the boyfriend of Sarah, the lead of the first film, but now she's married to town sheriff Axel, whose character in that film was not romantically aligned with the lead female. In another original scene, Tom goes down into the mine and is attacked by The New Killer; he survives though another worker is slain.  Witnesses from Harry Warden's rampage attest that Warden was murdered vigilante-style, though they can't find the body where they buried it.

Since The Miner was not about to move into Freddy Kruger territory, we're left with a limited number of suspects for The New Killer, and tthe 2009 film fails at creating sufficient red herrings. But its greater failure is that the script doesn't exploit the strengths of the 1981 movie, with its anxieties over the potentially deadly occupation of mining, and the associations of Valentine's Day. Though I appreciate some of the kinetic scenes in the remake, its mythicity has less substance than one of its 3D effects.