I ordered "Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet" from amazon.com, and upon its arrival I slid it into my DVD player for my first showing. I agree with most of the critiques on the review portion of the amazon.com page for the reasons given out, so this is my take on the opening scenes, why they don't work, and how they could have been improved upon. Perhaps some aspiring film-maker will read this and get some ideas for what not to do in making a slasher/horror movie.
The opening sequences are frightening enough, but they don't make much sense. The villain of the film, twelve-year-old Mary, appears at the very beginning of the movie to be incredibly disturbed and it is difficult to believe that her mother, who comes into her daughter's room to brush her hair, doesn't notice Mary's spooky catatonic behavior. If I were a parent and I found my kid acting like that, you'd better believe I'd see that something was wrong.
The next thing that happens is Mary's mother waking up to the sound of breaking glass and going to investigate, finding a trail of blood leading to the bathroom, which is streaked all over with the stuff. Mary's mom is understandably frightened and she immediately goes to check on her daughter, who for reasons never explained stabs her mother in the eye with a large kitchen knife. Then Mary proceeds to murder her father with a hatchet to the face, giving him a much wider smile than he probably would have liked for family photographs. Inexplicably, despite having had a huge knife embedded in her eye, Mary's mother is somehow still alive and has crawled down the stairs, reached the phone, and is dialing 911 to get out one last scream before Mary comes down to finish her off. Did I mention that some time between being stabbed in the eye and managing to crawl down the stairs, the knife came out?
Flash forward from 1978, when the initial murders take place, to 1989, when Mary is grown. She is confined to a mental hospital, and for reasons still not given she is huddled in her room at night stark naked. A guard, stereotypically fat and creepy, comes into her room and brutally rapes her, leaving Mary pregnant. She gives birth, and the child is "revealed" to have died. Then, again inexplicably, Mary manages to get out of her room and with her bare hands proceeds to slaughter the entire staff. She is gunned down outside by a pair of police officers who arrive on scene to find her naked and holding the torn off head of her rapist. They shoot her after she throws the head at the squad car's windshield, breaking it.
The rest of the film I won't give away, but the other reviews reveal enough about the plot without giving too much away that they are very helpful. Suffice to say that if you enjoy slasher films with huge amounts of blood and boobs, this is the one for you. The setup scenes for the film's homicidal ghost, all of which takes place before the opening credits even roll, kind of drag out but the remaining setups in which the rest of the characters are introduced make up for it by being better paced. Not too much time or information is given about these disposables, rather, just enough is given to make you give your sympathy or your dislike. Then the killing begins. Other reviews complained about the second round of character setups dragging on, but I found they weren't any slower than the opening one.
What I want to focus on are the story flaws that are rampant throughout the opening scenes. The first and most glaring I have pointed out: Mary's strangely unnoticed odd behavior. It's never really explained why her mother doesn't notice it, although it is implied by this failure to see what's going on that perhaps it is nothing new; Mary seems already to be very disturbed, and one gets the impression that her mothers already knows this. But if that's so, then why is her subsequent violent behavior such a shock?
Then we have all that blood in the bathroom. Someone who has bled that much simply isn't going to have the strength to murder two grown people no matter how unawares they are taken, especially if she's only twelve. It's suggested that Mary's menstrual cycle is somehow involved, that it has gone into overdrive making her incredibly homicidal and -- again without explanation -- giving her superhuman strength. Special effects allow the viewer the implication that it may be the result of demonic or some other form of supernatural possession, but again we are given no other hints that this is what's behind the movie's gruesome events.
Then we're supposed to believe that a woman who has had a large knife driven through her eye and into her skull, with all that damage shown, was able to survive long enough to get down the stairs (albeit half crawling, half slipping), pick up the telephone, dial 911, and manage any kind of coherent words before Daughter Dearest comes down to finish her off? I realize that in slasher films a certain amount of disbelief must be suspended, but this is a bit much.
Now, here is where things get really bizarre. It's eleven years later, and Mary is next shown huddling naked in the middle of her room in the mental hospital. A fat, ugly, creep of a guard walks by during his rounds, leers at her through the window making really creepy baby-talk, then enters the room and proceeds to rape her. If Mary is possessed of supernatural strength, as is suggested in the opening murder sequences and in the scenes following, why doesn't she have it to fight off her attacker? Between her rape and her childbirthing, Mary's doctors observe her behavior, and after she has the baby, she is informed rather coldly that her child is dead. Now, I admit that I don't know how real-life mental hospitals are staffed or how the personnel behave toward patients, but one would think that they'd show a bit more compassion toward someone who was brutally raped while in their care -- especially when the following murder scenes suggest that he was never caught much less punished.
Which leads us to the next logical question: how does Mary get out of her room? That is never shown — again, supernatural forces are implied as she pops up out of nowhere and literally twists the neck of a nurse with her bare hands before going on to kill everyone else in the building, all completely unarmed. Would that she'd been able to demonstrate that strength when her guard came into her room and raped her, otherwise we'd have been spared that bit of nonsense. Someone must have gotten a phone call to the police before being killed, but the authorities must not have taken it very seriously because only one squad car arrives on the scene. By that time Mary is already walking outside, stark naked, carrying the head of her rapist in her hands (in a crotch-covering position). The officers draw their guns on her and order her down on the ground or they'll open fire, but it's clear that isn't going to happen. She throws the head at the car's windshield, crunching it, then screams like a banshee before the two cops shoot her down. Now, this scene being in 1989 or 1990, tasers weren't in wide circulation, but one would think that when faced with an obviously unarmed naked suspect, guns would be the second thing drawn. (Nightsticks would be the first.) No attempt to take Mary alive is made. If the cops realized how violent she was that they felt the need to use lethal force as the first resort, why weren't more called out? Yes, the film is low-budget and had to make do with what it had, but still...
And this is all before the film's credits even start rolling. Flashes of newspaper headlines as those play reveal Mary's young age at the time she murdered her parents, which render the crimes all the more implausible considering her hyper-menstrual cycle is supposed to have caused profuse bleeding that would likely drop someone fully grown.
Shots of doctors' reports during the opening credits reveal that the driving force given as explanation for Mary's homicidal tendencies is Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, which is supposed to cause violent mood swings and intense bleeding. Mary is prone to violent fits of rage during her period, which makes the apparent lack of security both before and after her rape and subsequent childbirthing so much more puzzling. Either the reports were exaggerated or we're looking at one of the most incompetent mental hospital staff in cinematic history. At least in John Carpenter's original fright fest, "Halloween," it's explained that the killer was catatonic for fifteen years and lulled the staff into complacency.
Once this setup is out of the way, the rest of the movie unfolds as typical 80s-style slasher fare, with a lot of blood, gore, and bare breast shots to titillate viewers. When the murders begin happening, it's suggested that Mary's demonic spirit manifests from time to time to murder the unwary travelers upon whom she comes across. The revelation as to the killer's identity is disappointingly not as surprising as the writers would have had us believe, and it's a bit insulting considering what was established earlier in the film. As I have written, supernatural forces are implied to be at work, which would explain a lot more if it were presented in a better fashion than was ultimately done.
If it were me writing the screenplay, I'd settle on supernatural forces as the driving force behind Mary's actions and not use the misogynistic excuse of Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder at all. It's really pointless and adds nothing to the story, merely using a natural part of female biology as a way of saying that women are psychos when Aunt Flow comes calling. I'd also not go the route of linking the killer to one of the main characters since it's been done so many times before. And I would make sure to write the "escape" scene so it's plausible.
Having said all this, I did find the movie enjoyable once I buried my 'what-the-hell' impulses. The special effects were actually good, being a combination of old school makeup and latex complemented with CGI that seems to have been done by professionals. Most CGI these days is done by sloppy amateurs who don't care much about making it look realistic, but here the emphasis was on CGI as simply an enhancing component of traditional SFX media. Clearly, the film-makers cared enough about their audiences to at least make their FX look realistic even if the story itself was lacking. The humor was done in all the right places, giving pause between moments of tension without going over the top or coming across as pretentious. And the acting was superb; horror icons Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris lend additional power to an already talented cast of lesser-known actors and actresses.
For what is stated as a first time effort, "Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet" isn't nearly as bad as it could have been, though it does fail to reach the level to which it aspired. If director Frank Sabatella, who is given writing credit with Elke Blasi, can use this as a learning experience and tighten up his storytelling, I think he'll go far in the genre. Only time will tell.
