MY BLOODY VALENTINE
By Raymond Knowby
Canada’s slasher rip-off from the golden era is kind of a long lost cult favorite that, in all honesty, scared the living hell out of me as a kid. As an adult, I still find it pretty chilling; a great use of setting and a frightning killer gasmask mining suit making it stand slightly ahead of the pack in this flooded genre.
Valentine Bluff hasn’t had a Valentine’s Day in twenty years, thanks to a brutal accident in local Hanniger Mine. As patrons celebrated and two mine officials ignored their duties to hurry and join the fun, a methane explosion and collapse killed several workers and trapped one Harry Warden in with the bodies. It took weeks to dig him out, and when they found him, well, he wasn’t in the best of shape any longer, okay eh? The following year, Mr. Warden returned to his hometown, hacking up the two that caused the mishap with a mining pick and leaving a vow that the city would never again have a Valentines reunion.
It’s the present day now, and as the town prepares to have another go at Cupid’s holiday, someone starts killing and sending cute little rhymes and torn out human hearts to the local police. One by one, frivilous townfolk are dispatched by a Vader-breathing miner, but it gets a little interesting when a pack of beer drinking employees take their dates down into the dark shaft for a late-night tour. Several imaginative deaths and a sense of clausterphobia help this otherwise run of the mill formula stay abroad in most scenes.
It isn’t without flaws. The quickly made effort to cash in on the slasher craze has some spotty dialogue, dumb character moments, and one extremely cheeseball romance scene that should have been hacked to the editing room floor. Originally, what did get excised was some of the gratuitous violence, so be sure to snag the current special edition dvd release that reinstates a great deal of Tom Berman’s oustanding make-up effects.