At 10, ‘Hatchet III’ Is The Perfect Horror Finale
Chad Collins
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It’s easy to make a slasher killer. A slasher icon, however, is a different, axe-wielding beast. Several filmmakers have tried (and unfortunately failed) to convincingly justify their slasher villain’s placement in the horror canon. A parallel line of thinking with Roger Ebert would suggest a bonafide slasher needs just three things: hedonistic teens, a masked maniac with a sharp weapon, and a remote locale to slaughter them. While Ebert’s contention came with derision for the formula, I use it here endearingly.
A slasher movie really doesn’t need much more to work. To last, however, as a horror perennial, it needs as much heart as it does gore. Damien Leone’s work with Art the Clown in the Terrifier duology is perhaps the best contemporary example. But a decade before him, Adam Green introduced the world to Victor Crowley in his retro riff Hatchet. The capstone to the original trilogy (quasi-reboot Victor Crowley notwithstanding) turns ten this year.
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The original Hatchet premiered way back in 2006 (releasing in 2007), a time when audiences still had memories of Halloween: Resurrection and Scream 3, fresh wounds of their masked favorites turning into parody. Sure, both have had a contemporary reevaluation. But at the time of release, the pair were met with contempt from audiences and fans alike. As the slasher torch fizzled out, audiences were left with a bloody whimper instead of a gruesome bang. Resultantly, post-9/11 anxiety took hold, and domestic horrors shifted elsewhere. Multiplexes were filled with Asian horror remakes and horror cinephiles were sustaining themselves on sundry French Extremity offerings, perhaps the decade’s closest slasher parallel. The retro slasher in its purest form was dead. Fans were left wailing in the bayou, desperate for someone to reunite them with the unfeigned slashers of yesterday.
Hatchet had everything a slasher aficionado could want. There was genuine tension, noteworthy mythology for its Bayou Butcher, Victor Crowley, the bullied, deformed boy resurrected to haunt his swamp every evening, and—most notably, some things never change—heaps and heaps of bloody practical effects. Hatchet had heads ripped from their stumps and faces rendered mush at the end of a belt sander. It was horror excess, though it never devolved into parody. Writer/director Adam Green certainly poked fun at convention—one beat has Crowley manifesting out of nowhere in an empty field, a nod toward the slasher villain’s penchant for appearing wherever the plot demands. But, he did so with reverence, not disdain, for the foundation.
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Naturally, Green’s film was a smash. Three years later, he would script and direct the cleanly titled Hatchet II. A direct follow-up in the vein of Halloween Kills (seriously, Hatchet II is pretty much Halloween Kills), lone survivor Marybeth Dunston (horror royalty Danielle Harris, replacing Tamara Feldman from the original) stumbles home, reuniting with Tony Todd’s bit player from the first. Victor Crowley is real, and Todd’s Reverend Zombie knows how to stop him.
The following night, he leads a group of quasi-southern mercenaries back into the swamp to stop Crowley. Hatchet II is arguably the weakest entry in the series. The deaths are bigger and better—there’s a giant, giant chainsaw, come on. Still, the heart of the original sinks in an excess of trite humor and juvenile gags. It’s not a disaster by any means, and most notably, it was an early augur for Terrifier 2’s success last year.
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Hatchet II is distinct insofar as it had a short-lived unrated run at AMC theaters. The unrated cut only lasted three days before being prematurely pulled. Green chocks it up to the chain’s reluctance to screen an unrated horror movie in the midst of online controversy, though AMC has simply cited performance as the cause. That’s likely not the case, but as a small yet not insignificant moment in horror history, it’s remarkable that Hatchet II was available theatrically in some markets. That’s no small feat for an uber-violent cult slasher movie.
Hatchet III came three years later. Green wrote the script, though directing duties were handed over to B. J. McDonnell. While the Hatchet DNA remains—crude humor, over-the-top practical deaths—it would do Green’s trilogy a disservice to reduce it to just another gorefest. Green’s script for Hatchet III is smart. Sure, the detours into hick, racist humor still don’t work (sorry, Sid Haig), but Hatchet III is as remarkable a closing chapter as any. Like the previous entries, it’s horror star overload. There’s Danielle Harris, Caroline Williams, Zach Gilligan, and, of course, Kane Hodder as Victor Crowley. Amusingly, Derek Mears, 2009’s Jason Voorhees, goes toe-to-toe with Hodder’s Crowley in a Jason-versus-Jason brawl to the death (I don’t need to tell you who wins).
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Before trauma horror became, well, trauma horror, Green was already exploring the roots of slasher survivalism. Few horror movies, let alone slasher movies, track the follow-up. After the final girl emerges from the swamp, is anyone going to believe a ghost slaughtered everyone out there? Hatchet III wisely posits that, no, it’s not liable to be believed. Concurrently, Harris’ Marybeth remains committed to putting an end to Crowley’s curse. Green even ends things here (at least for a while). He resists the urge for one final scare, one last-minute gotcha. His mythology is sound, and for a time, the slasher villain is really dead.
As noted, Hatchet III turns ten this year. A staple for horror fans at the time, it’s worth revisiting for newer audiences. Under all the Grand Guignol savagery is a horror movie with heart. It’s as confident a horror trilogy as I’ve ever seen, one committed to its singular vision, one that pays homage while solidifying an identity of its own. The original film’s cheeky tagline says it all: “It’s not a remake. It’s not a sequel. And it’s not based on a Japanese one.” The Hatchet trilogy is horror filmmaking at its finest. When Victor Crowley was blown away at the end of Hatchet III, it was clearer than ever before. Adam Green didn’t create a slasher villain. He created a slasher icon.
Categorized:Editorials
