'My Bloody Valentine': A Dissection (1981)

"Sarah, be my bloody valentine..."Character from "My Bloody Valentine".

Hello, one and all.

I love a good splatter movie, and with Valentine's Day approaching, it would seem useless to not watch the George Mihalka's 1981 blood-splattered bon-bon, My Bloody Valentine from 1981. Why? Just because. This Canadian independent film was released in February of that year at the height of the slasher movie craze. Yep, the days of "Crazy Eddie" record shops, pre-MTV, and simple pleasures like sex, blood and, guts, exploitation was never lost on this fat, hairy, man-crazy fuck!

The poster always confused me though. I never understood what I was looking at. Two half-crazed beady eyes behind a strange mask with blood pouring out the nose of the mask left me at a loss. I was eight years old—how the fuck was I supposed to it was a miner's mask? But after May when Happy Birthday to Me released its iconic scared-shitless-guy-about-to-have-a-shish-kebab-skewer-shoved-to-the-back-of-his-fucking-head poster, I think I had less nightmares with the MBV poster.

Slasher movies had been pretty cut-and-dry up to this point. Young, nubile teenagers or college kids getting high, fornicating, skinny-dipping, getting into all sorts of shit, only to be hacked to bits and pieces by some unseen or masked killer had been the thing. But the brilliant Halloween was released in 1978, and Friday the 13th in 1980. When former Beatles star, John Lennon, got shot in December of that year, violent horror movies pretty much got shot down in a major backlash against the genre. They were often considered causes for delinquency, crime, drugs, STDs, even interest in the occult, ya-da, ya-da. But after years of the genre petering out, we know one thing and one thing only...most of these movies were pure, utter shit to begin with.

MBV is no different. It has all the trappings of a grade-Z splatter, guts/gore, exploitation-fest. What separates this from the usual pack is that the cast comprises of mostly adults in their early 20s or 30s. It's set in an obvious Canadian province (the accents are so super thick, I'm guessing Nova Scotia) with a lot of woods, and the main source of income: mining. No teenagers or sex-starved college kids. Instead, we have a bunch of adults who, frankly, are still sex-starved and act like overgrown kindergartners. So, like their teenage counterparts, they were just looking for a reason to get pickaxed to death.

The Original 1981 (Totally Confusing) Poster

The DVD (Less Confusing) Box Cover

Plot summary: A group of miners, all buddies, are getting ready for a long overdue Valentine's Day dance after a decades long tragedy kept them from doing so. Does the fact that the town is called Valentine Bluffs give any indication that the tragedy was just a rotten way to remind the cast that they were just lined up for a mass murder spree? A handsome young buck named T.J(Paul Gelman), who works in the mine, has his eye on Sarah (Lori Hallier), but now is his best friend's (Neil Affleck) girl. Soon, after a young woman is slashed with a pickaxe in the mine and her heart is ripped from her chest, the townspeople are given a rude awakening. A disturbed miner named Harry Warden killed several townsfolk years before when he was neglected and left for dead in the mine, and is now returning for another massacre go-round. Human hearts stuffed in heart-shaped chocolate boxes seems to be his modus operandi.

As the carnage increases, all the action takes place in a mine with Harry Warden bumping off everyone and going after T.J and Sarah until a fight ensues in the big, bloody climax, and we all learn that Harry Warden may very well not be doing the killing after all, and....that's all I feel like revealing.

MBV is by no means high art or a terrifying horror epic. The script is laughable, the acting beyond comical, to the point that telenovela actors may have turned in award-worthy work compared to this shit. But as junk splatter movies go, it has its guilty pleasures. It's well-shot (in an actual mine, no less) and has its fair share of solidly gruesome scenes and kills. Use of pickaxes, boiling pots, water spouts, a laundromat dryer, even a nail gun, are put to great use. The cast was young and attractive and, yes, the unedited version that Paramount Pictures didn't release because of excessively bloody violence that the MPAA forced the filmmakers to trim or outright cut out, is still the version to watch.

In conclusion, MBV is a bloody good time. Cross my heart and hope to...eh, you get the-

[pickaxe through the gut of this blogger; blood spews on laptop]

Final Thought: Was this film so worthy of its 2009 reboot?