Hatchet 3: B

So, there’s this guy with a hatchet. A demented, redneck, indestructible guy with a hatchet. He likes to chop people up with his hatchet and this is the third movie in which he gets to.

This was a  really fun horror film that reminded me of early 90’s gore-fests I used to watch as a kid. It probably had something to do with the fact that Kane Hodder, the guy who played Jason in a LOT of the Friday the 13th films, plays the very Jason-like murderer, Victor Krowley.

Like said gore-fests, the actual plot only bookends the film. Some sheriffs go to investigate a murder in the swamp in Louisiana. Victor is there and he kills everyone. They send in backup and Victor kills everyone. They send in the SWAT team and Victor kills everyone (in one really incestuous-horror kill scene, the SWAT leader, played by the same guy who was Jason in the Friday the 13th reboot, is killed by Victor, who played Jason in a lot of the original movies). It only takes about twenty minutes of plot to deliver an unending supply of cops for Victor to slaughter and then you get a solid sixty minutes of gore. Then Victor’s supernatural origin is exposed and he is finally defeated in the final ten minutes.

The make-up and production value was really impressive. The villain is basically identical to Jason Voorhees but sometimes all a movie needs is cool make-up and a silent killing machine.

The kills are brutal and remind me of stuff I used to watch 20 years ago. Someone’s head is cooked with defibrillators, spines are ripped out, someone’s head is sanded off with a gas powered sander, and there are all sorts of hatchet-related deaths. They even shoot someone with a short-range missile. There is heavy metal music, screams and bone-crunching noises, and all types of physics-defying murder. Every internal organ imaginable is exposed and mutilated. One guy’s spine AND HEAD are ripped out THROUGH HIS STOMACH. How? Shhh. Hatchet 3.