Change Your Image
jdrakeh-1
Reviews
Hatchet II (2010)
Worse than the original in pretty much every way.
First, let me start off by saying that I liked the original Hatchet very much. It was a fun, if cheesy, return to the glory days of American slashers in the early 80s with surprising good special effects and a relative cast of unknowns acting their hearts out. The sequel *probably* could have been something awesome, unfortunately it looks like most of the budget got frittered away on:
1. Danielle Harris, 2. Tony Todd, 3. Kane Hodder
Not that these actors aren't worth a few extra dollars. They absolutely are. There is, however, this thing called *budgeting* that you need to be familiar with when you make a movie and, if you blow your whole budget (or most of it) on recruiting name talent, then everything else will suffer.
I knew there were going to be problems right from the very start of the film. The film opens with Danielle Harris (Hey! That's not the chick who played the heroine last time!) wrestling with Victor Crowley (Hey! The make-up isn't applied to the area surrounding his eyes in the close-up!) and eventually eye-gouging him (Hey! That shot is obviously staged with a dummy head!) to get away.
It's really a bad, bad, opening scene in a very jarring kind of way and, unfortunately, it sets the tone for the rest of the film. I really think that this sequel would have been deserving of its theatrical release with a better eye toward budgeting things differently. As it stands, it's really more worthy of a straight to DVD release.
R.S.V.P. (2002)
A nice vision, but. . .
Whilst this film has ambition and a laudable goal, due to heavy-handed foreshadowing a perceptive viewer can deduce the 'climax' within the first ten minutes of the film. The subsequent dénouement (something that might have made the predictable climax forgivable, if handled well) is, unfortunately, quite. . . well. . . stupid.
The killer, previously packaged as a warped genius, delivers a dimwitted dialogue at the end of the film that is devoid of much needed surprises and more reminiscent of something that a James Bond villain might say than of something that a twisted serial killer would. That the film itself ends on an upbeat note is the final nail in the coffin.
The special features on the DVD showcase an subplot casting the Professor as a serial killer (possibly as The Quick Brown Fox) that, if it hadn't been clipped from the finished film, would have made things much more interesting (though not any less predictable, due to the way the cut scenes were filmed).
In fact, that is the biggest problem with RSVP. The director seems intent on revealing all of the secrets up front, making this less like a Hitchcock film (or Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians) and more like a bad Columbo episode with a few extra bodies.