Hacking Away With Hatchet Leaves This Critic Wanting More ... Not in a Good Way!

Those fine folks at Anchor Bay are doing their very best to not only distribute low budget horror, but now are producing low budget horror. Their latest release “Hatchet” is set to hit shelves on DVD on December 17. Much like “Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon” “Hatchet” was not given a wide release. However, there was much hoopla surrounding the film in horror circles as the tagline boasted, “Old School American Horror.”

The problem here is that the only thing old school about it is the amount of tits in this film. They’re everywhere, and yes, I enjoyed Mercedes McNab (Harmony Kendall from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) perpetually topless, but too much of a good thing is what it is and isn’t enough to distract from the fact that there is so little story, too much coincidence and a really shitty monster.

The premise is that Ben (Joel David Moore) is hopelessly broken up about his girlfriend since jr. high breaking up with him so his friends take him to Mardi Gras where he can’t even enjoy streets seemingly paved with boobs. Instead he wants to take a haunted swamp tour. Against his better judgment, Bud from The Cosby Show (Deon Richmond) joins him. There they meet a would-be Joe Francis played by Joel Murray, his two topless bimbos, a woman who believes her Dad was murdered by the deformed Victor Crowley (our lame monster), and the bumbling tour guide (Parry Shen).

There is no plot, just backstory for each character, and the fact that they’re all on the same boat together. Of course, once the boat crashes into a rock and they all must seek land, our story kicks into high gear and we find out about the deformed Victor Crowley who caught a Hatchet to the face while his Dad was attempting to rescue him from a fire. Now he’s trapped in the night he died and there’s little that our hapless victims can do to stop the inevitability of their fate.

The gore in this film looks okay, but the monster is just not scary, nor does he have a backstory that separates him from the pantheon of 80s movie monsters. There is nothing new here, and way too many continuity errors to just simply enjoy it. To add to my point about nothing new, “Hatchet” even panders to the idea of old school by using cameos from Robert Englund and Tony Todd, and electing to use Kane Hodder as their monster. Homage is nice, but I’d like to see a horror film that is just simply a horror film, not needing its predecessors to give it street cred.

The DVD has been packaged in a nice two-disc set that features the theatrical release, as well as the unrated directors cut, and there are also some nice extras that include commentary, interviews and some behind-the-scenes stuff. I didn’t make it to any of it as the theatrical release left me needing lots of time before I could ever revisit it again.

It’s not that the film left me mad … again, lots of boobs and gore, but not enough to save it from itself. Going back to where I started, it’s refreshing to see that Anchor Bay is really trying to create rather than just distribute, but I’m sure there was a much better script laying on someone’s desk somewhere.

Legion of Superheroes DVD Is Fun, But No Futuristic Extras

The fine folks at Warner Bros. have begun releasing their hit show Legion of Super Heroes on DVD with the release of Volume One recently and I’m here to say that it’s a whole lot of fun. This was something that I had missed on Cartoon Network, but was eager to see how it turned out as the Mark Waid run on the newest Legion series was a whole lot of fun and had me becoming a bit of a fan of those teenaged super heroes in the future.

Volume One contains the first four episodes and a featurette about moving the Legion from the page to the small screen. I desperately wish WB would put these things out in seasons, but for whatever reason they seem to think this format works better. It’s a bare bones DVD, but the selling point should be the series itself, and the four episodes that are included here, the first four, are a lot of fun.

The set up in the first episode is great in the Legion coming back in time to retrieve a young Clark Kent who isn’t even Superboy, let alone Superman. The joke in there is that the Legion has traveled back in time too far, but given time Clark will surely become the (super) man that he is destined to be. What’s fun about this is that Clark takes off to the future, being reassured that they can drop him back off before Ma Kent even knows he’s gone. I loved this element because it felt sort of like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends having that sweet apartment that turns into their HQ. I felt like the possibilities were limitless.

However, within these four episodes, Clark never does go back home, and that whole element seems to have disappeared. Clark leaving his time and saving the world only to get back in time for dinner in each episode would have been a nice touch, but alas it was just a way to get Superboy into the future.

Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t a great time while he’s there. It seems that Legion of Super Heroes has found a way to be a great, fun, kids’ cartoon without being as silly as Teen Titans or Krypto. It seems to fall somewhere in between the aforementioned shows and Justice League.

The show itself is something that parents can watch with their kids and have a lot of fun doing it. WB and DC are really doing a great job of bringing some rather obscure characters to animated life with some success, and Legion is no different. Again, I can’t help but think the DVDs could have packed a little more punch, but I guess four episodes at a time appeals more to the demographic of kids getting Mom to buy a reasonably priced DVD as opposed to the comic collector and DVD-ophiles who need it all. But here’s hoping the first season finds its way into a nice collector’s package soon.

Tales From the Crypt: Season 6 Still Delivers

As a kid I was always a big fan of horror and anything that required me sneaking into the living room to watch late night HBO. Tales From the Crypt fit that bill. Granted, by the time TFtC hit the airwaves I was 13 and didn't have to do much sneaking, it was still on late enough that I didn't want to wake the old people in the house. Now Warner Bros. is releasing them on DVD. Season six just hit the shelves recently, and while the show only lasted a total of eight seasons, and didn't pack the same punch in those later years, it was always fun!

Season Six features 15 classic episodes from 1994, featuring many stars of the silver screen, as well as some future stars waiting for their big break, including Benicio Del Toro, Sherilynn Fenn, Isabella Rosellini, Bruce Davison, Isaac Hayes, Corey Feldman and many others. In The Assassin, Corey Feldman and Jonathan Banks play Hitmen out to kill one of their own who has gone into hiding; capturing his wife just might bring him out of hiding, but how far has this hitman gone to hide his identity? The story has all of the fun and camp that you remember from both the EC Comics' title, as well this great HBO gem.

In "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime," Catherine O'Hara stars as an ambulance chasing lawyer who just might have met her match in a town that has a low tolerance for crime. It harkens back to the old Twilight Zone episodes as it builds some nice suspense with a fun conclusion. Catherine O'Hara gives a fun performance in an episode that has a nice twisty ending as you would expect from TFtC.

These episodes are fun, but not as scary as I wanted to remember. Of course, I seem to remember the early seasons having more scares, but that could just be one of those charished memories that don't live into adulthood. However, scary or not, the show still packs some really nice suspense, and fun twists. As always, the Crypt Keeper is our highly entertaining and ghoulish host. Most of the bits framing each episode in this season use pop culture references, such as dressing as Forest Gump, or playing games with William Sadler's Death (Yes, the very same Death from the highly underrated Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey). In fact, the appearance of Death was a highlight for me, like that missing piece of Bill and Ted lore.

Sure, there are a couple of episodes that feature some gore, however, it's 13-year-old gore and not quite what it used to be. On the other hand, any viewer interested in this set should already know that. It was ahead of its time, at the time, but time was starting to catch up by 1994. Overall, this set is certainly worth getting and watching on those late nights, with the lights out and some popcorn at the ready!

Pathfinder Loses Its Way!

The Unrated Pathfinder DVD came out last week, and I've had a chance to give it a once over. At first I thought it was an unfortunate happenstance that this film came out at roughly the same time as 300. Both are based on comic books published by Dark Horse, and both have an extremely stylized vision. Unfortunately Pathfinder's vision is like a blind man in the dark.

For something that I expected to be mildly entertaining, I was fighting the urge to turn it off. The tale in itself should have been one to hold my interest as my own heritage includes both Vikings (My family tree on my Father's side can be traced back to Leif Erricson) as well as Native American's, being 1/16 Blackfoot on my mother's side. A tale of Viking conquest in the new world should have been right up my alley, but it was not.

The meat of the story is that a Native American woman finds a Scandinavian boy alone and scared on an abandoned Viking warship. She takes this boy in and raises him as her own child. We flash forward to the boy as a young man, still not fully accepted by his tribe. Then, a second wave of Vikings invades and a battle ensues.

Unfortunately, the battle is rather uninteresting. Not to mention the fact that the Vikings are given subtitles while the natives speak English in a story that precedes the English arriving in the new world. Why not subtitle everyone, or perhaps subtitle no one? In this it begins its sloppiness. Add in CG blood that is the only real color in the film and it's not even interesting to look at. The film has a blue-grey color palette, but doesn't work with fake blood. The blood should match the rest of the style and it does not.

Clancy Brown gives a decent performance, but that's about all this film has to offer. The action is quick and looks choreographed, and most of the performances are bland. And so, not having seen the theatrical cut, it is tough to say what might make it Unrated. And if this is edgier, I now understand why there was such a minor media push for this film theatrically ... it just never gets to where it needs to be. The costumes are great, the color palette looks interesting, but these are all distractions from the fact that the film has so little going for it in terms of story and filmmaking. With a tale such as this, I would like to see the action, but the camera moves around it all so quickly that much of it is a stylized blur. Rent it if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Wait Till Your Father Gets Home is Both a Reflection of 1972 and Today!

In 1989 The Simpsons aired their Christmas special, and for many, this was something totally new, a depiction of a dysfunctional nuclear family that seemed more familiar to many families than what was depicted on typical sitcoms. In the beginning that show had dysfunction, but its popularity was largely due to its heart.

However, when that show was aired, not once do I remember it being compared to, what seems to me, its obvious predecessor, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. With Season One released as a Hanna-Barbera Classic Collection by Time Warner last week, it has become apparent to me what an overlooked treasure this show is.

Wit Till Your Father Gets Home was originally aired in 1972 and features the voice of Tom Bosley as Harry Boyle, an understanding father trying to understand a vastly changing world. His neighbor is conservative, way to the right, terrified of the communist threat to America, and thus runs a crack outfit of pseudo militants, The Vigilantes, bent on bringing justice and safety to their quiet neighborhood. And so The Vigilantes stand as a great example of just one extreme.

His children, however, go to the opposite extreme. The two oldest children, Alice and Chet serve to show the bleeding-heart liberalism that was prevalent in the 70s. Just one example, is in an early episode in which the family suspects Harry of cheating with his secretary. They don’t believe him when he denies it, yet they try to understand why he would cheat, rather than chastise him for doing so. Of course, not once do they consider that he didn’t. And Harry utters, “I get treated better around here when they think I’ve done wrong.” And the largest, most prevalent theme when dealing with the kids is that Chet, at 22, refuses to get a job.

Does any of this sound familiar? Is it a case of history repeating itself, as more and more kids are frightened of entering the workplace after college? Of course, it doesn’t help that there are few jobs waiting for them.

The youngest son, Jamie, who is voiced throughout the season by both Willie Ames and Jackie Earl Haley, seems to be a prototype for Alex P. Keaton, and sign of what is to come in the 80s. The young, entrepreneurial Jamie is constantly trying to sell whatever services he has for a little extra change, and even tries to barter up the value of a lost tooth, asking why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t account for inflation.

And in the middle of all, is Mom. She is a mom of the past. She is dependent on house and husband, but is ruler of the roost at home. However, she is always supportive of both the kids and Harry. She is the sole voice of reason, even when no one is listening.

Overall, it is a very unique family dynamic that sort of encapsulates the feelings of change that were spreading through the mass consciousness. And right along side of all of this social commentary is an animation style that fits the show so well. It is very pared down, putting less emphasis on backgrounds, and more emphasis on characters, and with this minimalist approach the viewer is left with a sort of less-is-more feeling.

In the end, the best way to describe it is as Family Guy living next door to American Dad with the heart, emotions, truth and honesty of the first few seasons of The Simpsons. For those who remember this show, it is worth the purchase as a reminder of the past, and a reminder of the present as it holds up remarkably better than many sitcoms of the 70s. That, in my mind is due to the themes taking precedence over the visual commitment of painting the 70s. It’s just a family, dealing with the issues of their, and our, times.