Hextuple Bill Mini Musings: Killer, Bunny Boilers, Germs, and Moon Nazis...

Hatchet II:
What's it about?
Adam Green's sequel to his low budget slasher & gore splasher about a deformed maniac with a hatchet wound in his face slicing & dicing in the swamps of New Orleans.
Who would I recognise in it?
Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, R.A. Mihailoff, John Carl Buechler.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
The first flick was, in many ways, almost unashamed in its pilfering of ideas from the Friday the 13th franchise. Fortunately this time it makes a modest move into its own territory (even if the foundations are based mostly on fanboy references to the 80s era of the horror genre). At a scant 82 minutes (with several minutes of credits), you'd assume that the pace would be swift, but the first half is mostly set-up for the back-half where a bunch of cannon fodder gets dispatched.

There's some inventive kills (pleasingly brought to life by practical means), and while half the script is underwhelming, the other half contains some enjoyable side characters and some cracking lines - there's promise amidst the mediocrity here, and at least it ends on a sly (and brutal) note, although one which is completely undercut by there being a third bite at the apple coming in 2013. That said, it appears that Caroline Williams, Derek Mears, and and Zach Galligan are in the cast, so the fanboys and fangirls out there will continue to be played to. Brutality wise, there's plenty of gore on offer, although I don't understand what all the fuss in America was about - it was released as an NC-17 and took a stand in doing so (for some daft reason, NC-17 is considered a filthy and disrespectful thing) and promptly did about sod-all at the box office. Here in the UK it was passed 18 uncut with no worries ... and still didn't do much business. There's some fun to be had here, but there's little else on offer than fanboy references to the genre's past, summing up a disappointing lack of ambition ... and the screaming nu-metal tosh on the credits is a total misjudgement. Alright.

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