The Rosetta shot: “Hatchet II”
You know how teenaged gorehounds sometimes make excitable lists of all the bizarre and hyperbolic ways they’d like to see people dispatched in films? There’s a reason big-budget movies aren’t made from those lists.
Adam Green’s Hatchet isn’t a great movie. It’s not even a good movie. But it does scratch, however nakedly, that old-school slasher itch; once it gets going (and, like the films it emulates, it takes way too long to get going), it offers some undemanding cheap thrills. Dumb as dirt and half as useful, Hatchet nevertheless delivers on the splattery promise it makes to its audience. That said, it doesn’t do anything else worth consideration and is ultimately kind of pointless. Hatchet is to cinema as a 7-11 microwave burrito is to food - it’ll satiate hunger by the most basic understanding of the concept, but there’s no reason to consume it unless you’re drunk or desperate, and even then you’ll probably hate yourself afterwards.
With that in mind, Hatchet II is what happens after the burrito combined with the alcohol and/or shame turn on you. In the ignominious tradition of pretty much every slasher sequel, it’s a wretched piece of regurgitated rot, the kind of film that still takes half a movie to set up its universe despite having thoroughly set it up in the first part. The only innovation, as with a good many of these types of things (i.e. the Friday the 13th series), is the escalated brutality of the money scenes, yet Hatchet II screws up even that by pushing its kills so far over the top that they become extravagantly ridiculous. The intended effect is to make the audience go, “OH COOL WOW I’VE NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE,” but the actual effect is an alienation - Victor Crowley’s dallying with belt sanders and table saws and so on try so hard to be so unique and KOOL that they become faintly insulting, like we’re being pandered to.
Compounding the issue, Green’s puerile sense of humor gets even freer reign than it did in the first film. For instance, consider the two hunters (one of whom is an Odious Comic Relief black dude who’s all rampaging, sassy id) who get ambushed by Crowley as he wields the most enormous chainsaw in creation. The two are then simultaneously bisected from crotch to cranium, and in most slasher flicks that’d be it - the wild death is the punchline. Green can’t resist trying to plop a cherry on top of the sickness sundae, though, so we’re treated to a shot of one unfortunate party’s disembodied testicles flopping to the ground. That’s not clever, son, that’s just moronic gilding of the bloody lily.
But let’s be honest - it’s not like Green doesn’t warn you from the get-go. As you can see above, his writing/directing credit appears on screen hovering above a fresh puddle of vomit. That alone sends enough of a warning, but here’s the kicker: Guess who that is in the scene as the ashen-faced fratboy responsible for said vomit? Adam Green, of course. Essentially he’s saying before things have even started, “Yep, I puked this thing up, and you’re stuck watching it. Too late to get your money back now, sucker.” Prost to you too, buddy.
