My Bloody Valentine

A group of miners are trapped after a cave-in when the mine’s supervisors left early to go to the town’s traditional Valentine’s Day dance. The only survivor, Harry Warden (Peter Cowper; Oh Heavenly Dog), resorted to cannibalism to survive. Becoming crazy, he was put into a mental institute once he was saved. He returned a year later on Valentine’s Day and got his revenge on the men whose negligence caused the cave-in. Before he was put away again, he warned the town to never again have a Valentine’s Day dance. Now twenty years later, the town of Valentine Bluffs is setting up for their first Valentine’s Day dance since the incident, with the young people forgetting the horrors of the past. But a warning is sent to the town’s mayor in the form of a human heart in a Valentine’s Day chocolate box. The message is clear. There will be more murders unless the dance is stopped.

The version I am using for this review is the 2009 Special Edition DVD released by Lionsgate (good luck finding the out-of-print Blu-ray cheap). This contains the unrated version of the film with all the extra gore that was removed from the theatrical release. So, of course, I am going to watch that one.

The story is fairly basic for a slasher flick. We get introduced to a town’s boogeyman in the former miner Harry Warden. This killer gets his own unique look by wearing a black mining outfit complete with a gas mask and helmet. His weapon of choice? A pickaxe. Beyond the development of the killer, the audience is shown a love triangle between Sarah Mercer (Warning Sign, Blindside), her former flame T.J. Hanniger (Black Roses, Gas), and her new boyfriend Axel Palmer (Visiting Hours, Scanners).

Most of the characters are young, but full-grown adults that work in the town’s mine (skirting the teenage trope a bit). There is a lot of drinking and a lot of making out, but nothing too gratuitous (there isn’t any nudity at all). Besides reinforcing the culture of the town and showing that all these characters exist, not a whole lot is developed with the secondary characters. Intersecting the developing love triangle of the leads, we also follow Chief Newby (Don Francks; Fast Company, Heavy Metal) and Mayor Hanniger (Larry Reynolds; Killer Workout, PCU) as they try to find the location of Harry Warden since discovering that he is no longer in the mental institute.

The leading cast delivers mostly flat performances. There is really no one that stands out much from the crowd. Their portrayals weren’t bad enough to be a detriment to the film, there just wasn’t any one actor that stood out from the rest. I found myself being more interested in a secondary character with an awesome mustache than I was in the leads. You will probably forget most of the characters’ names after the credits roll. The one thing that I think everyone did well with was their deaths. Their performances at those moments were quite good (and I don’t mean that sarcastically). Don Francks performance as the chief was probably the best performance in the film as he struggled with trying to find Warden before another person died. 

My Bloody Valentine does start spilling blood right at the beginning. The first thing you see is the movie’s killer, wasting little time before piercing the heart of his first victim. The effects of this movie are perfect ‘80s practical effects. They fulfill all the eye-popping, skin-melting, skull-breaking gore that personifies this kind of film, and they still look pretty good today. Unfortunately, a good amount of this was cut for the theatrical release and thought lost. With the unrated version, Lionsgate located and replaced some of the missing footage, but the picture quality drops significantly during these scenes due to the damage of the source of the missing film. However, if you enjoy your gore effects, you’ll appreciate the replaced footage even in the poorer quality.

Onto to the DVD. The video quality in the remaster section was great. Very little grain, well-balanced contrast, and vivid colors. As I said earlier, the recovered footage sections are not that great and stand out against the cleaner parts of the film. The sound was clear and the DVD contains both a mono track and a 5.1 surround track so enjoy your surround system if you have one. The audio will give you clear voices, great atmosphere, and the music track provides a solid accompaniment for the building terror moments on screen. Special features include a featurette, Bloodlust: My Bloody Valentine, and The Rise of the Slasher Film, which are pretty entertaining but feel very tacked-on and lackluster. It also included an interactive flow chart of slasher horror films that I quickly lost interest in, and deleted scenes with commentary from the director and special effects artists which were informative. So a mixed bag on the special features. However, just the additional footage does make this DVD a good addition to a horror fan’s collection.

The combination of the cuts of the gorier scenes and the influx of other slasher films at the time made My Bloody Valentine fall to the wayside, but with this release, it is given a bit of a boost in its status as a slasher film. New and old audiences are able to see a more complete and better film. While this is not the best slasher film, you will still get a lot of entertainment, revulsion, horror, and fun out of the movie. So grab your box of chocolates, pop this in your player, relax on your couch, and save me some popcorn!

Rating:

Jack Savage:

It will be a long time before this website runs out of slasher films from the ‘70s and ‘80s to review. My Bloody Valentine is tremendous fun for the fans of that era. Not only does it provide all the gore and scares that is needed for horror, but it does it while trying to remove some of the standard tropes of the slasher genre. However, you won’t miss them.

Trailer:

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