My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine is the simple story of two massacres and the most violent love triangle ever to hit the streets, VFW halls, junkyards, and laundry matts of one small Canadian mining town. One massacre was the result of a collapsed mine in which several miners died, from the initial explosion or the collapse itself or starvation -- itself an event worthy of more screentime than the collapsing love triangle. The one survivor, a man named Harry Warden -- of whom you shall hear of often, too often -- later murdered at least two supervisors who, we are told, absconded from the mine early before checking either levels and, to their grave irresponsibility, caused the initial explosion that caused the collapse that caused, presumably, the cannibalism and madness and seed for revenge. Warden was afterwards apprehended, but remained in a ghostly state of simultaneous confinement to a mental ward but also afoot in Valentine's Bluff, our mining town, still bearing a grievous rage against all things Valentines and has threatened -- perhaps by shadow-walking from his cell of some other astral projection -- death to anyone who should have a Valantine's party ever again. The Valentine's party being the temptation that proved too much for the supervisors to check the either levels that caused the explosion, so on and so forth,
Got it?
I hope so because that is as simply as I can describe the background plot to this movie.
And things get more complicated from there.
More complicated, that is -- if you want to make any sense of the otherwise senseless murders in this movie. Not that senseless murders are a sin in themselves in slasher movies -- Michael Myers was originally a quite unmotivated killer -- and senseless, meaningless death, even and especially gratuitously gory and cruel death, can be as entertaining as horror can hope to offer so long as they are funny. My Bloody Valentine thus departs from the movies before it by adding a dash of dark humor to its palate, and it's that little touch that saves this complicated, bleak, odd mess of a movie from itself.
The overwhelming bulk of the movie concerns a woman named Sara and her Sophie's Choice between two boyfriends: T.J. and Axel. I wrote earlier about the myth of a Final Girl's virginity either being a plot point or explicit, but with My Bloody Valentine I believe it's safe to assume that Sara's chastity has survived the combined charm of Axel and TJ. The conflict erupts when T.J. returns from the City, where he apparently fell on his ass after adventurously seeking something better than Sara. Although he postures as not caring that Sara is now with Axel, he still pouts for a long time: striking pool balls too harshly and stalking off to drink, "alone!".
Eventually, he confronts Axel at a junkyard party and the ground is laid for them to fight about it. When macho men mutually obsessed with one woman over whom they grant no agency, who is probably merely a projection of their desire for each other, but over whom they nonetheless get in bloody brawls, I prefer to see that in the real life, with real blood and real police and real hospital as well as jail time. But in a slasher movie it's fine as long as it isn't drawn out, which this movie does, and as long as it isn't meant to pull my heartstrings, which this movie does too. At least though it's done badly enough to be funny, with one especially hilarious parallelism. When T.J. and Sara have their beachside romantic scene, T.J. apologizes with all the pathos the bad actor playing him can manage, with his angle way higher than Sara's reverse, in which the better actor playing her probably had no difficulty emoting pity. This exact framing is used again later, after T,J, and Axel have their pathetic fight in the VFW Hall. I suppose you could call it "T.J.'s Apology Frame".
I suppose I should mention why the young peoples are having a Valentine's Party at the VFW Hall (which is supposed to be mining breakroom). This town for thirty or so years has had no Valentine's Dance because of Harry's threat, but was having one in 1981, on a spur. This dance is swiftly cancelled after the sheriff receives a human heart in a Valentine's box; an augury so portent with danger that he not only cancels the dance, which appeared rather lame anyway, but also parties, Valentine-themed or no, all across town. That Harry Warden, who must be somewhere around fifty to sixty years old now, has held this roughnecked town of young, eager-to-brawl mining boys in thirty-year fear of having a Valentine's Dance and succeeded seems implausible; more implausible still is that, rather than meekly acquiesce, they didn't just throw one immediately in some large building with the entire police force on patrol to shoot Harry dead the moment he tried to make good his threat. Whatever Wendigo strength and crazy immunity to pain and possible revenge-inspired buff he might have, he's only one dude.
But cancelled the dance is, and so our rebellious youth decide to have their own renegade dance in the VFW Hall. And this brings me to the murders. Often, it isn't so much to kills themselves -- which aren't gory, obscured with cuts and other cheats -- it's the discovery of the bodies that call for the most laughs. One of the first murders, the ill-fated woman who first suggested the dance, is not only killed despite her great age and sympathetic demeanor, but it then tossed in a drying machine to cook, apparently for a few days. Her body is quite burned, more burned than can make possible an apparent heart attack for the cause of her death, which the Sheriff tells those on the scene to report.
"Mabel died of a heart attack and nothing else, you hear!"
"She crawled right in the dryer and churned herself from Monday to Thursday and had a heart attack, goddammit!"
Later, in the mine, the burliest of the miners is shot in the head several times with a nail gun when he comes upon a death scene while the killer isn't quite finished with it. He moans and stumbles away, Meanwhile, three other kids are lined against a wall, each one a little taller than the other, as the camera pans across them to the corner of the wall. Then the burly miner's head pops up, uglily stupid and babbling from his walk down the mine. Perhaps though the funniest death was saved for Harold, the annoying prankster who -- I must say -- holds a place of hate in my heart for being one of the most irritating characters I've seen in a slasher movie.
Near the end, the remaining kids are climbing a rather long ladder, so long that this sequence goes on long enough to make me wonder how many sets were involved and how many times these poor actors had to climb a ten foot section of ladder. Then, Axel fumbles at the top and down falls Howard, hung from a rope from which he dangles just long enough to look stupid before he plummets a hundred feet to splat in a very satisfying plop. It made me laugh so hard it hurt and I rewound and rewatched it precisely as many times as Howard made an appearance.
Another thing I need to mention is the varying degrees of intoxication produced by relative amounts of alcohol in this movie. At one point, the bartender -- after the kids refuse to heed his poetic warnings about Valentine's -- drinks what appears to be no more than a quarter of a fifth, an good amount, granted, but given he's a bartender in a hard-drinking town and speaking from personal experience, not that much. He goes to the VFW Hall and sets up a dummy Harry, a stuffed mining suit that swings a pick axe once the door is open. A good prank, but not one worth several sober repetitions of, one that he pulls the door open again and again to laught at, which suggests he is so hammered I wonder indeed how he didn't already kill himself setting it up, He's killed when the killer replaces the dummy and pick-axes him in the balls with a cheap cut.
Later, a couple are lying on a conveyor belt making out. The woman tells the boy; "You know what we need?" He pulls out a condom, but she laughs and says "No. Two more beers." Now, whether she wasn't drunk enough yet to fuck him or he wasn't drunk enough not to fuck her is anyone's guess, but there had been plenty of swigging beforehand and it would seem those beers, for her endurance or his shame, would be superfluous. Those beers, however, lead to her death -- a unique one where her head is impaled on a shower faucet.
Alcohol in slasher movies: either as potent as whiskey or as impotent as whiskey dick, depending on whether the movie needs you to die or you need to get laid.
The killer, it's revealed at the end, is none other than Axel. His motive, we are told, stems from the fact that his father was one of the supervisors of lore whom Harry murdered. I have tried but cannot understand this. Why would Axel want to kill everyone in the town, except Sara -- for obvious reasons -- because of a Valentine's Dancer and by extension Valentine VFW Hall parties? Why would he not rather hike up to the mental asylum housing Harry and -- kill him? You could say that the mere repetition of the dance, which through a long and complicated cause-and-effect indirectly killed his father was a trigger, but why a trigger to kill his presumed good old friends? Had they thrown a regular, non-Valentine related VFW Party, would he have left them alone?
(The Sheriff, by the way, is remarkably naive to take the killer at his word that he'll kill, apparently, only w/r/t Valentine's Dances. He could, you know -- being a killer, and one who has until then sent many body parts in many Valentine boxes already -- just kill regardless, house to house, anyone and anything, whether they were celebrating Valentine's in the safety in the privacy of their own beds or simply as single men with a Penthouse.)
But the movie makes it clear that Axel is carrying on Harry's revenge, for some reason. I don't think they thought it through, and there's no point in us trying to either. It's a dumb twist, but doesn't spoil the funny kills and funny pouting fights over Sara. My Bloody Valentine isn't a great movie, not even really a great slasher movie, but it's a good enough translation of the formula into a new context to be worth watching at least once.
My Bloody Valentine is the simple story of two massacres and the most violent love triangle ever to hit the streets, VFW halls, junkyards, and laundry matts of one small Canadian mining town. One massacre was the result of a collapsed mine in which several miners died, from the initial explosion or the collapse itself or starvation -- itself an event worthy of more screentime than the collapsing love triangle. The one survivor, a man named Harry Warden -- of whom you shall hear of often, too often -- later murdered at least two supervisors who, we are told, absconded from the mine early before checking either levels and, to their grave irresponsibility, caused the initial explosion that caused the collapse that caused, presumably, the cannibalism and madness and seed for revenge. Warden was afterwards apprehended, but remained in a ghostly state of simultaneous confinement to a mental ward but also afoot in Valentine's Bluff, our mining town, still bearing a grievous rage against all things Valentines and has threatened -- perhaps by shadow-walking from his cell of some other astral projection -- death to anyone who should have a Valantine's party ever again. The Valentine's party being the temptation that proved too much for the supervisors to check the either levels that caused the explosion, so on and so forth,
Got it?
I hope so because that is as simply as I can describe the background plot to this movie.
And things get more complicated from there.
More complicated, that is -- if you want to make any sense of the otherwise senseless murders in this movie. Not that senseless murders are a sin in themselves in slasher movies -- Michael Myers was originally a quite unmotivated killer -- and senseless, meaningless death, even and especially gratuitously gory and cruel death, can be as entertaining as horror can hope to offer so long as they are funny. My Bloody Valentine thus departs from the movies before it by adding a dash of dark humor to its palate, and it's that little touch that saves this complicated, bleak, odd mess of a movie from itself.
The overwhelming bulk of the movie concerns a woman named Sara and her Sophie's Choice between two boyfriends: T.J. and Axel. I wrote earlier about the myth of a Final Girl's virginity either being a plot point or explicit, but with My Bloody Valentine I believe it's safe to assume that Sara's chastity has survived the combined charm of Axel and TJ. The conflict erupts when T.J. returns from the City, where he apparently fell on his ass after adventurously seeking something better than Sara. Although he postures as not caring that Sara is now with Axel, he still pouts for a long time: striking pool balls too harshly and stalking off to drink, "alone!".
Eventually, he confronts Axel at a junkyard party and the ground is laid for them to fight about it. When macho men mutually obsessed with one woman over whom they grant no agency, who is probably merely a projection of their desire for each other, but over whom they nonetheless get in bloody brawls, I prefer to see that in the real life, with real blood and real police and real hospital as well as jail time. But in a slasher movie it's fine as long as it isn't drawn out, which this movie does, and as long as it isn't meant to pull my heartstrings, which this movie does too. At least though it's done badly enough to be funny, with one especially hilarious parallelism. When T.J. and Sara have their beachside romantic scene, T.J. apologizes with all the pathos the bad actor playing him can manage, with his angle way higher than Sara's reverse, in which the better actor playing her probably had no difficulty emoting pity. This exact framing is used again later, after T,J, and Axel have their pathetic fight in the VFW Hall. I suppose you could call it "T.J.'s Apology Frame".
I suppose I should mention why the young peoples are having a Valentine's Party at the VFW Hall (which is supposed to be mining breakroom). This town for thirty or so years has had no Valentine's Dance because of Harry's threat, but was having one in 1981, on a spur. This dance is swiftly cancelled after the sheriff receives a human heart in a Valentine's box; an augury so portent with danger that he not only cancels the dance, which appeared rather lame anyway, but also parties, Valentine-themed or no, all across town. That Harry Warden, who must be somewhere around fifty to sixty years old now, has held this roughnecked town of young, eager-to-brawl mining boys in thirty-year fear of having a Valentine's Dance and succeeded seems implausible; more implausible still is that, rather than meekly acquiesce, they didn't just throw one immediately in some large building with the entire police force on patrol to shoot Harry dead the moment he tried to make good his threat. Whatever Wendigo strength and crazy immunity to pain and possible revenge-inspired buff he might have, he's only one dude.
But cancelled the dance is, and so our rebellious youth decide to have their own renegade dance in the VFW Hall. And this brings me to the murders. Often, it isn't so much to kills themselves -- which aren't gory, obscured with cuts and other cheats -- it's the discovery of the bodies that call for the most laughs. One of the first murders, the ill-fated woman who first suggested the dance, is not only killed despite her great age and sympathetic demeanor, but it then tossed in a drying machine to cook, apparently for a few days. Her body is quite burned, more burned than can make possible an apparent heart attack for the cause of her death, which the Sheriff tells those on the scene to report.
"Mabel died of a heart attack and nothing else, you hear!"
"She crawled right in the dryer and churned herself from Monday to Thursday and had a heart attack, goddammit!"
Later, in the mine, the burliest of the miners is shot in the head several times with a nail gun when he comes upon a death scene while the killer isn't quite finished with it. He moans and stumbles away, Meanwhile, three other kids are lined against a wall, each one a little taller than the other, as the camera pans across them to the corner of the wall. Then the burly miner's head pops up, uglily stupid and babbling from his walk down the mine. Perhaps though the funniest death was saved for Harold, the annoying prankster who -- I must say -- holds a place of hate in my heart for being one of the most irritating characters I've seen in a slasher movie.
Near the end, the remaining kids are climbing a rather long ladder, so long that this sequence goes on long enough to make me wonder how many sets were involved and how many times these poor actors had to climb a ten foot section of ladder. Then, Axel fumbles at the top and down falls Howard, hung from a rope from which he dangles just long enough to look stupid before he plummets a hundred feet to splat in a very satisfying plop. It made me laugh so hard it hurt and I rewound and rewatched it precisely as many times as Howard made an appearance.
Another thing I need to mention is the varying degrees of intoxication produced by relative amounts of alcohol in this movie. At one point, the bartender -- after the kids refuse to heed his poetic warnings about Valentine's -- drinks what appears to be no more than a quarter of a fifth, an good amount, granted, but given he's a bartender in a hard-drinking town and speaking from personal experience, not that much. He goes to the VFW Hall and sets up a dummy Harry, a stuffed mining suit that swings a pick axe once the door is open. A good prank, but not one worth several sober repetitions of, one that he pulls the door open again and again to laught at, which suggests he is so hammered I wonder indeed how he didn't already kill himself setting it up, He's killed when the killer replaces the dummy and pick-axes him in the balls with a cheap cut.
Later, a couple are lying on a conveyor belt making out. The woman tells the boy; "You know what we need?" He pulls out a condom, but she laughs and says "No. Two more beers." Now, whether she wasn't drunk enough yet to fuck him or he wasn't drunk enough not to fuck her is anyone's guess, but there had been plenty of swigging beforehand and it would seem those beers, for her endurance or his shame, would be superfluous. Those beers, however, lead to her death -- a unique one where her head is impaled on a shower faucet.
Alcohol in slasher movies: either as potent as whiskey or as impotent as whiskey dick, depending on whether the movie needs you to die or you need to get laid.
The killer, it's revealed at the end, is none other than Axel. His motive, we are told, stems from the fact that his father was one of the supervisors of lore whom Harry murdered. I have tried but cannot understand this. Why would Axel want to kill everyone in the town, except Sara -- for obvious reasons -- because of a Valentine's Dancer and by extension Valentine VFW Hall parties? Why would he not rather hike up to the mental asylum housing Harry and -- kill him? You could say that the mere repetition of the dance, which through a long and complicated cause-and-effect indirectly killed his father was a trigger, but why a trigger to kill his presumed good old friends? Had they thrown a regular, non-Valentine related VFW Party, would he have left them alone?
(The Sheriff, by the way, is remarkably naive to take the killer at his word that he'll kill, apparently, only w/r/t Valentine's Dances. He could, you know -- being a killer, and one who has until then sent many body parts in many Valentine boxes already -- just kill regardless, house to house, anyone and anything, whether they were celebrating Valentine's in the safety in the privacy of their own beds or simply as single men with a Penthouse.)
But the movie makes it clear that Axel is carrying on Harry's revenge, for some reason. I don't think they thought it through, and there's no point in us trying to either. It's a dumb twist, but doesn't spoil the funny kills and funny pouting fights over Sara. My Bloody Valentine isn't a great movie, not even really a great slasher movie, but it's a good enough translation of the formula into a new context to be worth watching at least once.