Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.
Of all of the subgenres of horror, torture porn is absolutely my least favorite and a genre I tend to avoid as much as I can. North of that, but not very far north, are slashers. I don’t love slashers in general. I have to be in the mood for them, and I’m not in the mood for them that often. More or less, I don’t really see the point of them. Slashers can be fun, but also feel pointless. There’s no message in a slasher. It’s about body count, and (at least in the best of cases) creativity in the kills. But they are a beloved subgenre for many people, which leads us to Hatchet, a film that wants nothing more than to dive into that slasher past.
Because it sells itself as an homage to classic slasher movies, Hatchet isn’t going to take itself very seriously. This is, I am almost sad to say, yet another version of creating a horror comedy. It does make me question why horror/comedy is such a common genre mashup. There’s an occasional horror musical (like Repo!) and horror romances and horror westerns. Horror and science fiction are so closely tied together that it’s not worth bothering to call it a mashup. But horror and comedy are united in odd ways. I think it has something to do with the nature of comedy rather than the nature of horror. Hatchet attempts a different way to walk that path. The results are…interesting.
