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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (15) | Top Critics (2) | Fresh (7) | Rotten (8) | DVD (7)
Director George Mihalka gets effectively naturalistic performances out of his leads, as well as an intermittently eerie mood, but ultimately, it's a movie enjoyed more for what it could've been than what it actually is.
''My Bloody Valentine'' probably won't make you shiver with fright, but it's almost certain to make you squirm, first with irritation and then with revulsion.
If you're looking for a good movie to watch this Valentine's Day or just a good slasher movie, this one is great!
This film is slightly better than most slice-and-dice efforts and contains several genuine surprises.
[Has] a sense of place matched by literally no other slasher film I have seen.
Old-school slasher film is too gory for kids.
The dialogue is laugh-out-loud hilarious at times, and you've gotta love the dated tunes and far-out fashions.
sick, twisted, and guaranteed to leave you numb, or nauseous, or both
As far as slashers go, My Bloody Valentine is fairly standard stuff. And yet, the film contains a pleasing atmosphere, turning a day dedicated to love into a day to be feared.
Quickly devolves into a piece of hackwork.
Standard slasher fare with attempts at being a whodunit.
It's different than Halloween! This one is Valentine's Day!
Normally an overabundance of Dutch angles would reignite queasy memories of Battlefield Earth and its tilted ignominy but when they are in a mine that culminates with a supposedly erotic sex scene, they can be easily forgiven. However, the romp is truncated short when the blonde bombshell is impaled on an axe and the footage switches to a grainy, non-MPAA-approve chest chasm. Clearly, the film was a victim of puritanical censorship upon release and it is obvious whenever the killer strikes. Certainly, a beheading while climbing up a ladder is a sleazy babel but the effect of transitioning to an image with cigarette burns neutralizes the harshness. Apparently this town's economy is dependent on the barely solvent mine in which they excavate... an undefined ore. The reaction to a raw heart in a Valentine's Day box is just shy of a fatigued shrug ("It can't be happening again."). This sluggish Canuckploitation horror flick borders unsteadily towards self-parody with the barkeep's recollection of Harry Warden approaching glib Kevin Williamson self-awareness ("Beware the 14th!"). They are seriously tentative about cancelling a dance? The fox trot and other Terpsichore displays are that important? Even though they're middle-aged miners (based on the casting), the day-laborers in Valentine's Bluff act like sex-starved frat boys (towel snapping, pranks with karyo syrup, etc.) which automatically decreases our hope for their survival. On top of subpar motivation, the love triangle at the center only serves to cushion the spaces between slice-and-dice indulgences. Slasher POV was a staple during the 80's and the addition of a helmet wheezing sounds hilariously similar to an iron lung. The most punishable sin is how it retreats whenever Warden's ax is about to sink into someone else and the drudgery through the shafts at the end is a bore. Despite the drawn-out third act, the mine cart fight and pick-ax duel is bountiful, if short-lived fun.
Super Reviewer
The kind of crappy slasher that doesn't even manage to be fun, with pedestrian dialogue and a repetitious plot that basically says that men are jerks and women are weak and whiny, forcing us to put up with two ridiculous machos at each other's throats the whole time.
During the late seventies and eighties there was a clear trend of slasher genre horror films based around holidays ("April Fool's Day," "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" etc.) While following in this vein, there's something original and dark about this film in contrast. Most of the film is set in the mines of central Canada, where a set of old murders haunts a quiet little town. A lot of the action revolves around a love triangle, the legends of the past, and being young and witless, with nothing to do. The last section of the film is entirely set in the bowels of a blackened mine, where the tunnels and overhead shafts provide plenty of hiding spots for a maddened serial killer. While this film takes great strides to not be the same as others of its caliber, it's still not very memorable. The killer is lame, the twist comes out of nowhere, the characters are idiotic and cowardly, the main female character is irritatingly frightened, and constantly needs saving, and the ending is ridiculous. Though I haven't seen the remake, I recommend it over this film, which is working with basically nothing but visuals, which I can only hope got better by 2009.
At a first glance, Rotten Tomatoes seems to show that this film is a relatively poor film, with it's roughly 33% rating on the Tomatometer. However, if you can ignore this and actually watch the film, you can see exactly why it was remade in 2009. My Bloody Valentine is the story about a mining village where a horrible mining accident happened due to a few miners deciding to leave the mine early for a Valentine's Day party. However, many years later, the people of the town decide to hold another Valentine's party, but someone doesn't want them to... The story is quite clever and creative, even though not actually very scary as a film. It is a good, confident slasher film, with some very clever use of symbolism (upside down hearts, along the same lines of the upside down cross Satanists use) and a clever ending. Although it is not the greatest film of all time, it is definitely one that is worth your time. It is one of those cult classics you have to watch, just to know what the fuss was about!
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