Movie Details
| Title: | My Bloody Valentine | |
| Director: | George Mihalka | |
| Year: | 1981 | |
| Genre: | Slasher | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.01.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- Pinball Summer
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.01.05 | Netflix | I guess this is supposed to be a real classic in the 80s slasher film canon... I think that the slasher film is pretty tight with its distinctions which both works for and against it. On one hand, you won't see too much straying from the central line of a killer murdering people over and over again, but on the other hand the attention becomes focused tightly on the nuance and style with which each movie is made. So when a movie gets cut by the studio and all the gore is taken out, it hurts all the more when the gore is supposed to be the central focus of the picture. It also reminds me of how fragile film can be... When we have 14 different DVDs of Evil Dead 2 and Night of the Living Dead available, I don't immediately think of the thousands of films that have been lost forever or are on the very brink of extinction. Lots of these films just get mangled and abused for their whole lives if they are not lucky enough to be a classic or make a lot of money. It's a real shame because there's charm with a lot of these, and I'm just finding out how big an audience there still is for genre/exploitation film. Anyway, this movie's about this guy who was buried when the mine that a bunch of kids were having a Valentine's Day party in caved in and he had to eat his buddies to stay alive for a week or however long it took to dig him out. Then, the next year, he breaks out of the loony bin and kills a bunch of people on Valentine's Day and the town, aptly named Valentine Bluffs, never celebrates the holiday again until this particular year. So it's a bunch of mining-related deaths and the young kids are miners and most of the killing takes place in a mine. Good fun but I really missed the gore shots. You can totally tell. they set up the shot like every other slasher film but then you just never get that payoff this-is-when-you-scream shot... very frustrating. A thread in the imdb comments about this movie led me to read up a bit on the status of the 8-9 minutes of cut footage that Paramount chopped to make an R (by today's standards, i'd say it'd still be R unless Spielberg was directing, in which case it'd definitely be PG-13)... and how torturous it is for the fans of this film to know that the negative still exists but Paramount are too pussy to ever release unrated movies on DVD and they still own the rights so it's pretty much dead forever. It really sucks that these kinds of reasons are usually what's behind your random favorite movie not being out on DVD or not getting the Criterion treatment... anyway, lack of gore aside, this movie was still fun and I can see why it has a fanbase. Not a favorite or anything but I'm glad I saw it. |
