Hatchet

Set in a Louisiana bayou, Adam Green’s old school slasher movie has all the right ingredients for a gruesome gumbo, but lacks an all-important piquancy. Bloody deaths, jokey cameos by Robert Englund and Tony Todd, breast-baring blondes, a killing-by-numbers plot and raucous rock music from pasty-faced poseur Marilyn Manson are thrown into the pot. Yet somehow the tired flavours never quite mingle.
On Halloween night, a hapless tour guide strands lovelorn twentysomething Ben (Joel Moore) and his wise-cracking black pal Marcus (Deon Richmond) in a supposedly haunted swamp. They and their fellow tourists – a porn director, two ditzy ‘actresses’, a middle-aged couple and a shy teenage girl – are then haunted and hunted by hatchet-faced hick Victor Crowley. Burned and hacked with an axe as a child, the hideously deformed Victor now likes to tear off the heads or chop off the limbs of passing strangers. Green’s efforts to strike a balance between knowing humour and no-holds-barred horror are stymied by an erratic tone: a slow, talky build-up gives way to a soggy middle section and a messy, all-stops-out finale.