With recent news of a third installment to the Hatchet horror franchise in the works, I decided that it would make sense to go back and watch Hatchet II. The movie picks up literally during the same scene the first movie ended in, which is just about the only redeeming part of the movie in my opinion. There aren’t many movies that do that because it alienates viewers who haven’t seen the original. The same holds true here, except its worse. It brings your hopes up for the movie before crushing them, which doesn’t exactly help Adam Green’s position as a writer/director in my book.
SPOILER SYNOPSIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FIRST: As mentioned above ,the movie starts off literally in the same scene the previous movie ended minus Ben (Joel David Moore) from the first movie. Marybeth (Tamara Feldman) is back and with the absence of Ben she takes on a more prominent role, rather than sharing the duty with Ben. The end of the first movie left you feeling like she was about to be the next victim of Victor Crowley’s (Kane Hodder) ridiculous killing antics but instead is saved by a local fisherman. It happens to be the same guy that had warned the group in the first movie not to go into the swamp. Shortly after saving Marybeth he discovers who her father was and promptly throws her out of his cabin. He tells her if she wants to find out why he threw her out she should go ask Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd). If you saw the first you might not remember Reverend Zombie considering the fact that he had about 30 seconds of screen time. In this movie he plays an exponentially more prominent role. His character essentially replaces Ben as the co-main character. Once Marybeth reaches Reverend Zombie the movie begins to crawl along. What comes out of the overly dramatic and tear filled conversation that ensues is that Reverend Zombie will take Marybeth back to the swamp to recover the bodies of her father and brother from Crowley’s shed. She had seen the bodies there in the first movie. The rest of the movie is really just filler of the most stereotypical American horror movie aspects you can imagine. Unfortunately, some of the creative aspects Green added to these elements in the first movie were not present in this one. The only redeeming part of the movie is once again the ending. But it’s a double-edged sword because it ends in a similar fashion to the first movie. This is good because it’s unexpected, but bad in that it’s nearly the same exact way the first ended. Which also means it was left open for the aforementioned upcoming Hatchet III. As a quick side note Green must have realized how downhill the Hatchet franchise was going as he decided not to be a part of Hatchet III.
This movie ranks very low on my horror movie list for several reasons; however it’s not worth going into all of them so only the most import ones will be discussed. The first is the trend of bringing back a majority of the characters (along with the actors) from the first movie. It makes sense in some cases but in others it felt as if Green had lost a bet and owed these guys some parts. Their return performances were so bad it would have been better if they weren’t there at all. In addition to this, some of the new characters were so mind numbingly the exact portrayal of an American horror element it would have saved the producers a lot of money to just cut out cardboard people and write the element they were trying to portray across the chest. Believe me it would have been much more interesting to see cardboard cut outs being pranced around by someone, rather than what was made.
Finally the one aspect of the first movie that I happened to like was that there was nearly constant action. Unfortunately, that nice aspect wasn’t carried over and there is a lot more dialogue, mostly to expand and explain Crowley’s legend. Although I didn’t like the back-story and felt that it could have been better, what was explained was enough for the film to carry on. It wasn’t really necessary for the back-story to be expanded upon here. This is because, as already mentioned, Marybeth wants to return to the swamp to recover the bodies of her father and brother. Without spoiling anything, all the time taken to give the additional information about Crowley doesn’t enhance the rest of the movie in my opinion. It just hinders it by turning part of the movie into a daytime soap opera.
Rating: If you have a hankering for a horror movie almost anything is better. (2/10)
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