HATCHET is a surprisingly decent modern-day slasher made as a tribute to the 1980s horror flicks of old. The best thing about it is that writer/director Adam Green (who also made the excellent FROZEN) is clearly a huge fan of the genre and a guy who pays tribute to it in every respect.
Of course, let's not kid ourselves here: this is hardly ground-breaking stuff, and the cheesy dialogue is a little, well, overripe at times. It's also a low budget film although location photography in Louisiana helps make up for that. The storyline is a predictable one in which a tour group visit the bayous by boat only to fall foul of an indestructible killer with a horrifically mutilated face who begins to dispatch them one by one.
HATCHET is all about the old-school gore effects and in this respect it comes up trumps time and time again. The killer - played to the hilt by Kane Hodder - uses all manner of implements to take out his victims, and the death scenes are a real hoot that celebrate good old-fashioned prosthetic effects rather than dwelling on sleazy torture porn or the like. Sure, the characters are one-dimensional, but that doesn't matter: this is a fast-paced tribute to the genre and one that works very well indeed; oodles of humour helps with that. Watch out for the Robert Englund, Joshua Leonard, and Tony Todd cameos.
Of course, let's not kid ourselves here: this is hardly ground-breaking stuff, and the cheesy dialogue is a little, well, overripe at times. It's also a low budget film although location photography in Louisiana helps make up for that. The storyline is a predictable one in which a tour group visit the bayous by boat only to fall foul of an indestructible killer with a horrifically mutilated face who begins to dispatch them one by one.
HATCHET is all about the old-school gore effects and in this respect it comes up trumps time and time again. The killer - played to the hilt by Kane Hodder - uses all manner of implements to take out his victims, and the death scenes are a real hoot that celebrate good old-fashioned prosthetic effects rather than dwelling on sleazy torture porn or the like. Sure, the characters are one-dimensional, but that doesn't matter: this is a fast-paced tribute to the genre and one that works very well indeed; oodles of humour helps with that. Watch out for the Robert Englund, Joshua Leonard, and Tony Todd cameos.