Hatchet2

Hatchet II (2010)

In the last few years there has been a batch of movies made that have tried to recapture the spirit of the ‘80s slasher movie with mixed results. But even the best of those movies didn’t manage to do what director Adam Green has done with Hatchet II. Not only does this movie feel like an old school slasher movie, but it is a damn good one! I’ll have more on that later now lets talk a bit about the plot.

The first Hatchet ended with Marybeth, the final survivor of a tour boat that sank in the swamp, getting away from the unstoppable killer Victor Crowley. This movie picks up right at that point (though this time Marybeth is played by genre vet Danielle Harris). With some help Marybeth escapes from the swamp and gets back to Revered Zombie, who was briefly seen in the first movie, with a few questions about her family and their connection to the killer Crowley. When Zombie explains about Crowley and his connection to her family Marybeth decides she is going back to the swamp to finish him off. And since it was illegal for him to send the tour boat there in the first place she forces him to help her. So they head back in to the swamp with a group of heavily armed men determined to come back with Crowley’s head.

Hatchet II is a well-written movie that knows it’s audience and gives us exactly what we expect. The movie is paced very well and wastes little time before giving us a nice kill, followed by some character development and them more kills! I love it when a horror film gets right to the good stuff and Hatchet II does that. I also thought that the movie does a nice job of mining some humor out of the situations without distracting from the overall story. And I don’t just mean cheap one-liners (which are actually really funny too) but some of the kills have funny bits to them as well. In the end what we have here is a horror movie that has a nicely written script. Because of this we get what could have been a well executed but familiar story turned it into an exciting and fun experience.

I wanted to briefly mention the cast. Too many horror movies do what I call “stunt” casting and put genre vets into a movie as glorified cameos, only to use their names to sell the movie. I was a little worried about this because other then Kane Hodder the first movie did use this trick with several other familiar faces. But that isn’t the case in Hatchet II. Tony Todd is killer as the returning character Reverend Zombie and gives his best performance in years. At times he is menacing and villainous, and at other times he is funny. More importantly he gets plenty of screen time and it was nice to see him given a chance to make another memorable character. Danielle Harris also gets a lot of screen time and does a decent job as Marybeth. But the one that really surprised me was the casting of director Tom Holland as uncle Bob. The guy can really act! Hell we even get to see a former Leatherface, R.A. Mihailoff, as one of Crowley’s victims. Yeah they give us a Crowley vs. Leatherface show down! As a fellow horror fan I had a blast with this. Hell even when they do have cameos with Lloyd Kauffman and John Carl Buechler (one of the best kills in a movie filled with great kills!) they aren’t distracting and can be fun for horror nerds.

So if I haven’t convinced you that you need to see this movie yet lets talk about the special effects and kills. They really ramped up the body count for the sequel and I appreciate the hell out of that. Some of the highlights are a ridiculous chainsaw killing of a couple guys, a decapitation followed by an axe to a very tender region (might have the ladies cringing for a change!), the best curb stomp ever, and a dude getting strangled with is own intestines. Again those are just the highlights and I’ve even left one of the better kills out so I don’t spoil it. Gore hounds this is the movie for you.

I haven’t had this much fun with a horror movie in a very long time. Hell I was beginning to think that I had seen it all and the thrill of discovering that next cool flick had run it’s course. Thanks Adam Green for showing me I was wrong. Guys really you need to check this one out.

3 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer