Box Art Review #4
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
Directed by George Mihalka
Starring Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck
The Movie
Once you get past the basic household names of the slasher
genre – your Freddys, your Jasons, Your Chuckies, your Pinheads, and so on –
there are a handful of cult classics that somehow never resonated with the
general movie going public as well as the others. This is a class that includes
movies like Prom Night, Black Christmas, The Burning, and of course, My Bloody
Valentine. Also noteworthy is that most of these B-list slashers got remade in
the last few years.
In the great tradition of Holiday themed horror movies My
Bloody Valentine sorta kinda loosely revolves around the titular holiday.
Really though, it’s a movie about a coal mining killer, but if you take away
the Valentine’s Day angle you’re left without the neato title and the clever
heart shaped box themed kills. The setup retains a lot of the usual horror
movie tropes, you got the small town with a secret past, a big social event
threatened by a series of murders, and escaped psychotic mental patient out for
revenge. At times the plot borders on parody, especially in some of the early
expository dialog and when the guy tells the story of the massacre from 20
years back only to be laughed off by the dumb young locals. Why is it always a
year divisible by five anyway? You never hear about a killer who went on a
rampage 23 years ago or whatever, although I’m sure the number 13 has been used
somewhere along the way. One of the cool things about this movie is whenever
somebody gets killed or a body gets discovered the movie switches to this
old-timey grindhouse filter with scratchy film and all.
The plot is pretty thin, the reason the movie is worth
watching is totally because of the Valentine theme; that and the fact that a
pick-axe wielding maniac with a gasmask makes for a pretty unnerving bad guy. I
almost wish they had just gone with the mining idea alone. They could’ve made a
movie like The Thing where a bunch of guys are working in a mine and one of
them is killing people and then they all get trapped down there and paranoia
sets in or something. If you’re gonna watch this movie make sure you check out
the BluRay because the transfer looks incredible.
The Cover
There are two kinds of covers that I love. One is the Drew
Struzan type of Holy shit there’s so much to look at cover and the other is the
subtle minimalistic imagery as seen on the VHS cover for My Bloody Valentine.
Even though there’s not much going on in this image, it really spells out everything you need to know. I mean, you got a gasmask and a mining helmet front and center, so you know for sure what the killer looks like at least, then there’s some party goers reflected in the lamp on the dudes head, that and the film’s title fill in the rest of what’s going on. Honestly though, that based title had me at hello. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that Irish shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine take their band name form this film’s title (their new album’s great by the way). As a guy who loves horror movie fonts though, I gotta say there’s not much to praise here, the title sequence in the film is much cooler with its two bloody hearts merging to form the Os in Bloody. On top of that, showing the killer's face through the mask was a mistake, the blank expression portrayed by the black lenses on the gasmask gives the killer a mysterious pseudo-supernatural appearance and the way they did it on this cover really crapped all over that idea.
Even though there’s not much going on in this image, it really spells out everything you need to know. I mean, you got a gasmask and a mining helmet front and center, so you know for sure what the killer looks like at least, then there’s some party goers reflected in the lamp on the dudes head, that and the film’s title fill in the rest of what’s going on. Honestly though, that based title had me at hello. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that Irish shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine take their band name form this film’s title (their new album’s great by the way). As a guy who loves horror movie fonts though, I gotta say there’s not much to praise here, the title sequence in the film is much cooler with its two bloody hearts merging to form the Os in Bloody. On top of that, showing the killer's face through the mask was a mistake, the blank expression portrayed by the black lenses on the gasmask gives the killer a mysterious pseudo-supernatural appearance and the way they did it on this cover really crapped all over that idea.
Movie: 3/5
Cover: 3/5
My Bloody Valentine (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
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