My Bloody Valentine (1981)

My BLINE!

Sorry, just thought I'd start my review with an obscure in-joke.

Anyway, this is yet another mad slasher movie set during yet another holiday where yet another masked killer is killing yet another gaggle of stupid teens yet again.

What's the difference this time, you may ask?

Same crap, different holiday.

Lessee: Halloween came out in 1978, meaning that the rest of Hollywood had to scramble fast to climb onto the blood-soaked bandwagon and rake in the bucks to cash in on something before its time went by. And for the years to follow Halloween, they sure did that.

Figures, though; they did the same thing with musicals, with documentaries, with 3D movies and with Burt Reynolds movies. And all of those things came and went pretty quickly (apologies to Burt, but it's true), but like all things, they come back around every so often for a renaissance for a few months or so. Except maybe for one of them; hang in there, Burt....

Mad Slasher movies, though, have always been and always will be around because they can be made cheaply, cast inexpensively and rushed through and turn a profit. Most of them can also be marketed almost entirely by word-of-mouth. And when it comes to premise, a lot of them can be summarized by five words:

Mad killer strikes during holiday.

And so it came to be we had Friday the 13th, Mother's Day, Silent Night Deadly Night, New Year's Evil, April Fool's Day, Happy Birthday to Me, The Hand (oops...I was thinking of Palm Sunday there...nevermind) and so on, some of which had sequels, others which were so slipshod and under-developed that they were lucky to get the one shot they got.

So it only makes sense that almost every holiday would get its own representation in the horror genre. Bringing us logically to Valentine's Day.

Now hold on: Valentine's Day was a holiday that came about in 500 AD when then-Pope Gelasius I established it in honor of the early Christian martyrs, many of whom were named Valentine. And then we have Geoffrey Chaucer in the Middle Ages to thank for the day being associated with romantic love. How, then, did we go from such a high-minded celebration of idealized love to a murderous masked killer on a rampage?

The same way we went from the celebration of the birth of Jesus to an axe-wielding Santa Claus: there's money to be made in it.

Now, as if this kind of thing needed any setup: 20 years ago in the peaceful little mining community of Valentine Bluffs, an explosion of methane gas took the lives of a group of coal miners on Valentine's Day, all because supervisors left their posts to attend the annual Valentine's Day dance. Oops.

A year later, Harry Warden, the only survivor of the accident - and he did look a bit plumper when they rescued him (wink wink, nudge nudge) - retaliated by killing the supervisors and warning the town never to hold another Valentine's Day dance.

Fair enough; I'd listen to a warning like that.

Flash-forward 20 years later as a group of young adults (let's just call them "teens", even if they are older, just because they all act stupid and won't listen to reason) decides to hold another dance.

Idiots.

After the usual warnings pop up - blood-soaked heart in a candy box, old woman tumble-dried to death in a laundromat, the usual stuff - all accompanied by ominous messages to knock this Valentine crap off, the dance is canceled. Good.

But (and there's always a "but" in movies like this because the people in them are stupid) a Valentine party is held in its place... at the coal mine.

You stupid moronic idiotic teenage-acting-and-thinking idiots!!!

Well. Because these "teens" and everyone else in this town all seem to be auditioning for their own personal Darwin Awards, they begin dying violently. Pickaxes to the chest and face, shower nozzle through the back of the head, hard-boiling of faces, nail-gunning, limb-chopping, hanging: everything that makes Valentine's Day memorable. See what happens when you don't listen to Harry Warden?

My Bloody Valentine came out during the heyday of Fangoria Magazine, which shows production pics of all "the good shots" from upcoming horror movies. I remember catching the issue that had pics from this beauty in it, many gory, detailed captures showed the salivating reader looking for blood and gore just what they could expect at their local theater.

Of course, many of them would be sadly disappointed, but I'll get to that....

This was concocted by story creator Stephen A. Miller whose career led up to this by writing for such TV shows as "The Jeffersons", "Flo" and that one show where MacLean Stevenson played a priest. The script was detailed by John Beaird who also wrote, ironically, Happy Birthday to Me, which did for birthday cakes and shish-kebabs what this movie does for miners. Which ain't much.

Director George Mihalka began his career by helming that 1980s sleaze epic Pick-Up Summer then made a career of directing many films and TV shows you've probably never heard of before in your life. Lord knows I hadn't. There are a few good camera angles here and there, but that's like trying to find Waldo when you're not really sure he's there to begin with.

The actors themselves all try their best but, seeing that 90% of them (and this whole production, in fact) hail from Canada, that's about 1/3 of the U.S. going rate for talent here in the States, so a lot of it doesn't get across the border. You may recognize names like Neil Affleck, Lori Hallier, Cynthia Dale and Helene Udy, since they are synonymous with stuff like this and many of them were there in the thick of it when it came to Canada's churned-out theatrical junk - in fact, if you had HBO at all during the mid-Eighties, you've probably seen the biggest chunk of this cast's work.

Now, about the effects: they are, for lack of a better word, good. Effective I guess is the best way to put it. But in its original release, albeit in its first VHS and DVD releases, the censors did more hacking and chopping than Harry Warden did, leaving carnage still, but not the kind of blood and guts those earlier Fangoria readers were coming into the theater to see. Can't give that Video Nasty group any reason to throw a conniption, now can we?

Of course, they got everything back to where it was meant to be seen 20-plus years down the road, but seeing that My Bloody Valentine's wealth was in its gore, could it stand on atmosphere alone?

Some. Cinematographer Rodney Gibbons gave a gritty look and feel to the proceedings and editors Gérald Vansier and Rit Wallis knew how to splice things together so that the viewer got their money's worth for shocks. But as far as actual bank-ability goes...?

For a budget of $2,300,000 in Canadian earning back almost $6 million American, I guess that's pretty respectable, though I don't know the allowance between currencies off the top of my head. Maybe it just sounds good, like having one million Mexican pesos sounds good until you convert it?

As far as a crass exercise in earning money for being on the holiday killer kick, My Bloody Valentine has no shame. It tries pretending it's original, but it just renamed Jason Voorhees Harry Warden, changed a summer camp into a mining town and replaced Kevin Bacon with Canadian bacon - or ham in this case.

I didn't care much for it, but darned if I don't still feel some nostalgia for this thing. After all, My Bloody Valentine was part of my childhood - as it was of anyone who grew up in the late Seventies/early Eighties. I grew up watching the ads for this on TV, catching glimpses of gore in magazines and wondering if I'd ever have the nerve to see it and find out if it was all that it was cracked up to be.

Well, I had.

And I did.

And it wasn't.

But it made me feel like a kid again.

Not that I want to rush out and buy Valentine's cards or anything.

My own mining mask? Maybe.