Here’s a confession that may require me to turn in my horror buff card: I do not get the love for the Friday the 13th series. Out of 12 installments, including the reboot and the crossover, I only really like Parts 4, 5 (yes, really — it’s the Halloween III of the series), and 6, and of those, only Part 4 feels like a real movie. The series lacks any sort of passion or imagination and established a tradition early on of sacrificing effort and budget in pursuit of box office returns.
All this is to say that, if Friday the 13th has become a classic mostly because of the longevity of its sequels, then George Mihalka’s Canucksploitation classic My Bloody Valentine is its overachieving younger brother. Released a year later to similar vitriolic reviews but smaller box office returns, My Bloody Valentine inspired the name of a great band but zero sequels (outside of a fan-made one released on YouTube earlier this year). But the movie has had remarkable staying power amongst horror aficionados and gore-hounds: even Quentin Tarantino cites it as his favorite slasher movie.
Watching the movie today, this passion is understandable. My Bloody Valentine is clearly the work of filmmakers cleverly using a limited budget to produce something that, if not unique, is certainly better than it has any right to be. Mihalka knows what his audience is there for and delivers a prologue where a nameless young blonde strips out of a mining suit before the guy she’s with (also in a mining suit) slams her through a pickaxe he embedded in the wall so the pickaxe comes through a heart tattoo on her breast while dreamy synth music plays. It’s the movie in a nutshell: leering, lurid, and dumb, but effective.
The audience is then introduced to the small mining town of Valentine Bluffs, somewhere in the Great White North, where preparations are underway for the first Valentine’s Day dance in 20 years. The last time, a mine caved in after the supervisors left to attend the dance. The only survivor, Harry Warden (Peter Cowper), resorted to cannibalism, went mad, and returned the next year to murder the supervisors by cutting their hearts out and leaving them in heart-shaped boxes. When the town tries to throw the Valentine’s dance again, the murders start happening again. Is it Harry Warden returning? Or some copycat? 16 years before Scream, My Bloody Valentine played with this sort of whodunnit structure.
It’s a nasty setup, but Mihalka never neglects to play up the tension of the situation either. Each candy box holds a threat of spilling out a bloody heart (and a ghoulish poem), and Mihalka makes sure to stage the early kills for maximum impact. As long as I live, I’ll probably never forget the poor woman who’s killed with a dryer. For the first half of the movie, Mihalka luxuriates in the small-town atmosphere, which exudes personality and some level of authenticity. But the movie picks up in its back half when the local miners (among them future Simpsons animator Neil Affleck) and their dates defy the local sheriff’s order to cancel the dance and move it to the mine itself. The kills remain gory (to the point where it’s impossible to view the movie in its intended form; the MPAA cuts were so extensive that no restoration has been able to get all the missing footage), shocking, and, most of all, fun. But what’s really remarkable is the film’s use of atmosphere, all dank darkness and the occasional blaring light. The movie ends with the killer cutting his own arm off, still trapped in the mine, howling pleas for someone to be his “bloody Valentine.” Nothing can match Leatherface’s dance at the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but My Bloody Valentine deserves some credit for getting closer than most.
Time’s been far kinder to My Bloody Valentine than it has to the other also-ran slashers of the ‘80s. It even got a 3D remake in 2009, alongside the remake of Friday the 13th (they even got one of Supernatural’s Winchester Brothers each), and, true to form, Valentine’s remake was still better than Friday’s. I often say that a big budget is counterproductive in horror movies, and My Bloody Valentine is a prime example of what some enterprising filmmakers can do on a shoestring with a little bit of passion and imagination.
