Review of My Bloody Valentine (2009) by Chads. — 17 Jan 2009

"My Bloody Valentine" sounds more like the name of a shoegazing band from Dublin that it ever did as a slasher film set in a dour coal mining town. After 1991's "Loveless", the Kevin Shields-led band was never heard from again.

Too bad the same couldn't be said about Harry Warden, the poor man's Jason, and the poor, poor man's Michael Myers. This "Friday the 13th"-knockoff, released ten years before songs such as "I Only Said" and especially, the heavy shoe-metal of "To Here Knows When" helped steal the name from its source, returns, and tries in vain to steal it back, with the novelty of 3D effects.

Nice try. Although "My Bloody Valentine 3D" slavishly abides by the genre requirements of a slasher pic(down to "the final girl"), this remake, to my surprise, has pizazz(the 3D effects have come a long way from its "Jaws 3D" growing pains), and even some smarts(independent of the narrative).

Prior to Ben Foley(Kevin Tighe) getting the pickaxe, the antagonist from John Sayles' "Coalminers from Another Planet"(in other words, "Matewan") shines his flashlight directly at the audience.

He breaks the fourth wall; he encapsulates the animus behind Michael Haneke's "Funny Games"(both the Belgian original and American shot-by-shot remake) with this throwaway gesture. Scorned and misunderstood by a legion of moviegoers, "Funny Games" left many people feeling dirty, because the filmmaker made them complicit to the violence.

Despite its populist pedigree, the three-dimensional diegesis is a much more effective tool than Haneke's use of deconstruction, as the filmic world now replicates, more or less, the real world situated in your theater.

Phantasmagorically speaking, both sides of the divide are a seamless whole; the movie people resembles us more than ever. If things can escape from the screen, theoretically, things can enter the same way it came out, as well.

But we're only voyeurs; we sit and do nothing. Being the confrontational artist that he is, Haneke implicates his audience for its passivity, in a terribly gruesome scene, where the gore of a child splatters all over a television set.

"My Bloody Valentine 3D" goes one step further, the gore lands in our laps; the gore in our laps is a stigmata of our own unacknowledged thirst for blood.