Advertisement

Movies & TV

Victor Crowley is (still) very, very angry

Back in 2006, before the Friday The 13th reboot and the rediscovery of slasher movies, a filmmaker named Adam Green made a movie called Hatchet, in which a bunch of horny idiots take a boat tour of the New Orleans bayou and wind up hunted and slaughtered by a deformed maniac named Victor Crowley.

Hatchet made money, which gave us Hatchet II – in which Crowley hunted the characters lucky enough to survive his first rampage, along with anyone else who got in the way – and now there’s Hatchet III, which picks up precisely where the last one left off.

Funny thing, though: Hatchet II left off with final girl Marybeth (Danielle Harris) pulping Victor Crowley’s skull with a shotgun. Repeatedly.

Fortunately, you can’t keep a good maniac down, and thanks to a centuries-old voodoo curse Victor Crowley regenerates every night back to his hulking, murderous self. So all Hatchet III has to do is wait for the sun to go down – and the victims start piling up all over again.

This time, Marybeth is locked up after showing up at a police station covered in gore and babbling about the indestructible maniac who’s just hacked his way through dozens of people, so Victor gets to hunt the police and paramedics sent out to investigate her story.

This is actually clever, since it gives the movie a much-needed change of venue – and allows for an infodump in which a very insistent journalist (Caroline Williams, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) explains the nature of the Crowley curse and Marybeth’s connection to the killer. And because this is the third chapter of a trilogy, it all comes together in the last ten minutes, as a handful of survivors of Crowley’s various massacres converge on Honey Island Swamp for a final, bloody confrontation.

If you saw Hatchet III this past Wednesday night as part of Cineplex’s Sinister Cinema series, you know the movie (directed by BJ McDonnell, with Green writing and producing) is reasonably satisfying. It’s not as loose or funny as the first installment, or as intense as the second – mostly because Williams is a terrible actor and struggles with her cumbersome expository dialogue – but Harris is solid, and Zach Galligan (yes, the guy from the Gremlins movies) puts a decent spin on the foolhardy sheriff who disregards multiple warnings to charge straight into danger.

And if you missed it, you can catch up to it at the Big Picture Cinema in Leslieville as of today. It’s one of those last-minute bookings that are becoming more and more common lately, as a distributor decides that advance response to a one-night-only screening merits a commercial run, which then means finding screen space at the last minute. (The Big Picture is becoming Anchor Bay Entertainment’s go-to venue for such bookings it hosted The Frankenstein Theory earlier this month.)


If you’re looking for more cerebral cinematic pleasures, you’re going to want to look up the latest issue of Cléo, the cinematic web magazine published by occasional NOW contributor Kiva Reardon. (Full disclosure: she’s also a friend.)

The new issue, centred around the theme of “Home,” features an interview with Attenberg writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari, who pops up in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, essays on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, Todd Haynes’s Safe, and much more. Do check it out it makes for fine summer reading.

And then go see The Act Of Killing, because I know you’ve been putting it off.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted