Nuts and Bolts:  Big ass swamp monster attacks random people with potato peelers, turkey basters, barbeque skewers and squeegees. Anything but hatchets. Nope. No hatchets here. Not a one.

Summary: We start off in the Louisiana bayou where a grisly Robert Englund is taking his possibly homosexual son, Ainsley, out night fishing in their boat. The queer squirms around a bit and decides to take a leak off the side of the boat; a tactic that nearly gets his pecker bitten off by a cock-hungry gator. Yeah, I know… redundant. What alligator doesn’t crave the taste of cock? Surviving this initial encounter, Ainsley hits the woods to find a safer place to take a whiz. When he comes back though, he finds that someone has killed Robert Englund most thoroughly. Betcha wish ya had the Freddy glove now, don’t ya, motha fucka! Ainsley ain’t long for this world either though. After finding his pa hacked to shit, something leaps out of the woods and attacks him. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say that the possibly homosexual son ain’t HALF the man his father is.

So now we cut to the French Quarter of New Orleans where we find a group of friends enjoying the splendors of Mardi Gras. Now new Orleans has been the provincial setting in enough horror movies, so you should know how the Mardi Gras gig works: Parades, mimes, gaudily-clad revelers, drunken college kids floundering in puddles of their own urine, tramp-stamped whores flashing their boobs, un-stamped drag queens (also flashing their boobs), horse prostitutes and a midget. There’s always a midget in these things.

Of the assembled group of five friends I spoke of earlier, the only ones that need to be addressed are our two main characters, Ben and Marcus. Marcus is having a great time, chugging down “Big Ass Beers” and gawking at nipples, but Ben is pretty much buzz-killing everybody’s fun by moaning on about his ex-girlfriend. Ben wants to check out some swamp riverboat tour, but Marcus has no interest in it. He finally convinces him to come along and the two begin exploring the head shops and various voodoo parlors of the Quarter. They meet a verbose, yet cantankerous proprietor named Reverend Zombie who, after tantalizing them with his own personal tale of woe, refers them to a shop down the street.

This voodoo shop is run by a young Asian-American named Shawn. When they ask about the swamp tours, Shawn greedily pockets their forty bucks (each) and ushers them onto his “Scare Bus”. Here, Ben and Marcus meet the rest of our cast. There is Jim and Janet Permatteo – a middle-aged couple who fit the mold of the classic tourist. There’s Misty and Jenna, two boob-flashing babes who are trying to break into stardom by filming a soft porn movie for a director named Doug Shapiro (also a member of the cast). Finally, there’s Marybeth. Marybeth doesn’t have a lot to say at this point and sits on the bus with her face to the window. Ben tries to schmooze her with some seriously lame pick-up lines, but Marybeth blows him off. Shawn drives the tour bus towards the swamps and gives the rubes the 3x5 index card tour (literally). Amusingly, the Permatteos seem to know more about the Crescent City’s lore than Shawn does, and they correct him at every turn.

They finally get to the swamps, and Shawn ushers them all into his “Scare Boat”. He takes the boat into the swamps and engages his customers with tales of local lore – particularly, the lore surrounding the mysterious Victor Crowley. According to Shawn, Victor Crowley was born a disfigured retard who lived out here in the swamps with his father. Naturally, a kid whose ass is on his face is going to be the recipient of beaucoup torture and ridicules and Vic Crowley was no different. On Halloween night many years ago, a group of cruel trick or treaters taunted Crowley by throwing sparklers into the windows of his house. This accidentally set the place on fire and Crowley, being retarded, couldn’t figure out how to open the front door and get out. His father happened to come out while the place was going up in flames, and since he couldn’t get the door open either, he decided to break through it with a hatchet. As luck would have it, Swampy McTard was pressed up against the inside of the door and the business end of the hatchet whacked him in the melon. So now, this mongoloid, affectionately referred to as “Hatchet Face”, supposedly haunts the bayous of Louisiana searching for his father.

Now, whether the guests of this swamp tour really give a shit about Shawn’s story is immaterial. They’re more concerned over the fact that the doofus crashes the boat into a fallen tree and sinks the fucker. They all begin to file out of the boat when suddenly a cock-hungry gator leaps up and begins gnawing on Mister Permatteo’s leg. Marybeth happens to have a handgun on her and scares the gator off. While the others try to help fat-ass Permatteo get to dry land, Ben inquires as to why Marybeth is carrying a gun. She tells them that she is looking for her father and brother who went missing in these swamps the previous evening (Robert Englund and his queer son in case you haven’t guessed).  She also reiterates the story of Victor Crowley, asserting that he does in fact haunt these swamps because he’s somehow “stuck in the night that he died”. Yeah, umm… okay.

Grabbing her hubby, Mrs. Permatteo begins dragging him towards a dark house in the distance. Marybeth calls after them, warning them that it’s the old Crowley place, but they just keep on trucking. Too bad for them, because this is when Victor Crowley jumps out in all of his muscle-bound retarded glory. With Hatchet in hand, ole Vic gets to work on whittling Mister Permatteo down to size. Sweet. His doughy wife tries to run away, but Vic is faster than she and catches up to her pretty quick. Grabbing her mouth with both hands, he begins yanking in opposite directions, making it much easier for Mrs. Permatteo to sexually gratify Mister Permatteo were he still alive. During this debacle, Marybeth squeezes off a few shots with her handgun. The bullets hit Crowley, but this barely even slows him down and he lopes off into the woods.

Now the younger, more spry guests of this ill-fated swamp tour are all witness to this and engage in the traditional caterwauling, mewling and  flopping about in circles that one would expect to find themselves in given the circumstances. They dash off further into the swamp, hoping to God they can outrun the marshland mongoloid. Ben and Marybeth, clearly the more level-headed of the crew, insist that everyone should stay together.

Naturally, this is usually when at least one member of the party decides to break north. In this case, that party member is Doug Shapiro, the sleazy, yet tragically underappreciated porn director. Hatchet Face catches up to him and twists his head off like a Corona bottle.

The violence dies down a bit and we endure the remaining cast members arguing amongst themselves over what to do next. The two harlots bicker back and forth at one another, and Marcus gets into a scuffle with Shawn.

While wandering, they stumble upon Doug Shapro’s duffel bag. They rifle through his shit and find a wallet which includes his driver’s license and real name, Samuel M. Barrat of Newark, New Jersey. Figures he’s from Jersey. Moments later, Ben trips over Shapiro’s body. If nothing else, they at least know that Vic Crowley is still alive and still hopped up on crazy-kill drugs.

Dipshit Misty hears her cell phone ringing off in the distance. In case anybody gives a shit, her ring tone is the theme song to Dawson’s Creek. Bit of trivia, actress Mercedes McNabb (Misty) once did a guest appearance on the show. No, that doesn’t mean I actually watch that dumb-ass shit. It just means that I know how to use the Internets. Fuck the Dawson AND the Creek he rode in on.

By this point, the surviving cast realize that they have really just been running around in circles and they are now right back where they started – in front of the Crowley house. Ben and Marybeth decide to explore a shed on the property in the hopes of finding some weapons or tools to arm themselves with. Whilst exploring the tool shed, Marybeth discovers the dismembered remains of her father and her queer brother.

Outside, Marcus, Jenna, Misty and Shawn hear noises coming from a bush. What could it be, I wonder? Could it be Victor Crowley? Could it be Santa Claus? Could it be an eight-foot tall, artificially created, sentient vaginal secretion? Naw, it’s just a raccoon. Time for the cast to take a well-earned sigh of relief. Now you know what a sigh of relief in horror films means right? Yup. Ole Hatchet Head himself jumps up from behind another strategically placed bush and attacks the crew. He pounces on top of Jenna with a (I shit you not) gas-powered sander and gets to work. Ben and Marybeth run out from the shed when they hear the noise and Misty and Marcus begin running away. Shawn however, tries to pick up a nearby shovel, but Crowley gets to it first. He makes like Samurai Baker and cuts off Shawn’s right leg at the knee. Bitch goes down and Crowley finishes him off by sticking the shovel into his throat, decapitating him. Now sand-face Jenna, bloody and lipless is trying to crawl away, but Crowley picks her up and impales her on top of the shovel. Ow! I’m sure it’s painful being impaled on top of a sharp object, but can you imagine being impaled onto the dull, rounded end of a shovel ? Oh well. Fuck her. She was kind of a ditz anyway.

So the others keep running about and they decide to return to the shed to get the weapons that they got around to getting earlier. Ben comes up with the idea of using gas cans to soak Crowley down and light him on fire. Ben goes into the shed, leaving Marybeth and Marcus outside in hopes of distracting Crowley should he arrive. Misty disappears.

Ben checks the gas cans and gets his shit together, when suddenly a severed head comes flying towards him. The head belongs to Misty and I’m certain it didn’t weigh very much. Ben barely feels the impact. That’s okay though. Crowley compensates for his error in judgment by chucking the rest of her bloody, yet still bodacious body at him. Marybeth runs in and tries to help keep Crowley away from Ben. They finally splash him down with gasoline and Ben lights him up with a thrown Zippo. Crowley howls in pain and spins around in circles as the flames overwhelm him, burning off all of his badass swamp monster dreds. He falls to the ground and is down for the count. Don’t cheer for the heroes just yet though. Seconds later, a flash rainstorm bears down on them and extinguishes the flames on Crowley’s body. Even Ben is shocked by this unseemly turn of events and shouts, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

Not taking any chances, the three remaining cast members, Ben, Marcus and Marybeth run off towards a nearby cemetery. Crowley gets up and chases after them. Now he’s really pissed! It’s one thing to have an ass-face, but to have a burned ass-face on top of it. No, that won’t do at all. Crowley tackles Ben and, for reasons that I have yet to fully understand, begins spitting some white jizz into Ben’s mouth. Kinky. Marcus and Marybeth kick him off and they try to run. Crowley grabs Marcus however and tears his arms off. Then he takes his flailing, armless body and uses it like a baseball bat. Unfortunately, the “baseball” in this scenario is actually the side of a big mausoleum. Buh-bye, Marcus.

While Crowley’s playing Babe Ruth, Ben takes a moment to vomit up that nasty-ass monster spunk. Yeah… umm… I really don’t know what else to say about this.

So they finally get past the front gates and run out of the cemetery. Crowley pulls one of the gate poles down and being the athletic sort that he is, decides to forego baseball now in favor of the javelin toss. He lobs this wrought-iron projectile across the way, spiking Ben in the foot. He then begins a mad, retard monkey charge at them. Ben and Marybeth’s next plan is something straight out of a While E. Coyote sketch. Rather than pull the pole out of Ben’s foot, they instead lean forward on it (causing him even more excruciating pain) so that it is pointed horizontally. Crowley fails to neither zig nor zag and he impales himself on the pole. To add insult to injury, Crowleys’ death-rattle results in coughing up a big wad of blood directly onto Ben’s face. What the fuck is it with this guy? Snowballing. Facials. Will there be spooning? Why can’t the big, gay retard keep his bodily fluids to himself? No fricking class at all. Ben finally gets his foot free of the pole Marybeth and he limp off into the swamp.

Conveniently enough, Marybeth’s father’s fishing boat is parked only a few feet away. Naturally. They get into the boat and begin paddling out into the swamp. Marybeth starts wrapping Ben’s injured foot. Now since the credits haven’t begun rolling yet, you would be correct in assuming that Crowley is not yet dead, and still has some more bodily secretions to swap with Ben. He pops up from out of the water and grabs Marybeth, pushing her into the muck. Near as I can figure, he wants some “quality time” with Ben, and this bitch is just in the way. She begins drowning, and her foot gets tangled up in some weeds. She looks up and sees Ben’s hand in the water trying to reach her. She grabs it and is pulled up out of the muck. Even though it’s Ben’s arm that she’s clasping onto though, the arm is no longer attached to Ben. Ben is lying backwards, bleeding to death in the boat. Crowley, using the severed arm to pull Marybeth up, howls and lunges at her. Cut to black.

Acting/Dialogue: The acting in this flick is better than most. I think Joel David Moore nailed the role of Ben, the lead “hero” (though he’s hardly heroic). He has good timing and knows when to play it straight, and when to play it campy. Aside from watching a few episode of Bones, I’m not overly familiar with Mister Moore’s body of work, but I’m definitely sold on this guy and will check out just about anything I see him in. Deon Richmond plays his buddy, Marcus – the veritable voice of reason in a world where reason doesn’t exist. Initially, I wasn’t buying the friendship. It appeared like they were trying to capture the same “safe black man hangs out with nerdy honky” dynamic that seems to be popping up in popular comedy venues like Psyche or Scrubs (both of which are awesome shows by the way, and if you don’t watch them then you are irredeemably homo). Fortunately, Moore and Richmond fall into their roles pretty quickly and they pull it off. Maybe it was the sidekick background buddies that were holding them back. The characters seemed to come more into their own once they ditched the riff-raff.

The back-up comedy relief is provided by Mercedes McNab and Joleigh Fioreavanti who play the wannabe Girls Gone Wild chicks. It’s hard to gauge their acting chops since the characters were really irritating – which, I suppose was by design – so good on you. 

It’s also difficult to gauge Kane Hodder’s performance. It’s easy to say, “Hey, he’s just a guy running around in a rubber suit, waving his arms”, but you and I both know that there’s a lot more to a role than just that. To Kane’s credit though, we actually get to see a brief cameo of Kane in flashback playing his own character’s father. It’s a rather sentimental bit and we get to see Kane cry. How often does that happen? Normally this is where I would call someone a pussy for crying on camera, but on the off chance that Kane Hodder actually reads this and decides to track me down and eat my family, I won’t say it.

The dialogue in Hatchet is at times witty and at times sophomoric. For the most part it works, but there’s once piece that just sticks in my ass cavity like that one little temperamental pebble shit that refuses to join his big brothers in the pool. The line is, “Victor Crowley is trapped in the night that he died.” What? What the fuck does that even mean? A needlessly cryptic line and it comes off very forced. 

Gore: Now this is someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing! Big, great greasy globs of gashing, gouging, gurgling grossness galore! The gore is definitely over-the-top, and as such, it becomes a little unrealistic, but who cares, right? This is the kind of shit that people want to see. I’m sick to death of these weak-ass conventional kills. That was fine when I first began exploring my calling, but as a “mature” horror movie enthusiast, a simple steak knife to the spleen simply doesn’t cut it anymore. If you want to impress movie watchers, your effects need to be unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, and I think Hatchet comes admirably close to hitting that mark. Now the death scenes here are not in any way unique, mind you. Just about all of them have been done at least once before, but the sheer brutality of them is what makes gives me such a warm feeling in my cockles. I won’t go into gross detail about them (pun), because I really don’t wanna spoil the magnificence of it any more than I need to, but I will say that you will for certain learn how many whacks with a hatchet a body can withstand before it completely falls apart. You will also learn exactly how flexible the human jawbone really is. You will also learn precisely how much torque is required to pop someone’s head off with a shovel so that you can get that par three. And you will reaffirm the notion that a power tool can be applied to nearly any body part with satisfactory results.

Guilty Pleasures: Mercedes McNab and Joleigh Fioreavanti flash their fun bags at consistent intervals throughout the film, and for that I’m grateful. The timing of which seemed practically perfect. Whenever the audience begins to get a little antsy and tired of exposition and witty banter, McNab and Fioreavanti pops the “girls” and all is right with the world. There’s also some early moments where you see some Mardi Gras revelers flashing their boobs at the camera. Just enough to wet the palette, as it were.

The Good: Finally! Finally, finally, finally finally, finally, FINALLY! A horror movie director who’s not afraid to be a horror movie director. Hatchet’s got balls! None of this watered-down candy-ass PG-13 rated bullshit. Hatchet redefines the word viscera and adds a healthy dose of arterial spray to the equation to boot. This is the kind of blunt force trauma that the pussies from I Know What You Did Last Summer wish they could make if they ever mustered up the intestinal fortitude to pull their gonads out of their vaginas. Yeah, I said it. And I don’t apologize. The dudes who made I Know What You Did Last Summer have vaginas. It’s true. I saw it on You Tube. 

When I popped this into the DVD player, I truly expected to see a b-grade, below average, cheesy, rubber chicken suck-fest with poor production values. I was overwhelmed by how “un-sucky” it actually was. Now, is this the greatest horror movie of all time? Hellz no. Not even close But I think it adequately meets the standards of other popular brand names like Chucky, Jigsaw, and Pinhead. I’ll say one thing for sure, it’s a fuck of a lot better than those goddamn Leprechaun movies!

Hatchet boasts the tagline, “Old School American Horror” and it shows. Maybe a little too much, but I’ll get to that later. It’s got the right blend of in-your-face gore, satisfactorily paced boobage and awkward humor.

In terms of casting, I should let you know right away that we’ve got the horror movie tri-fecta here, Kane Hodder, Robert Englund and Tony Todd. And if you don’t know who those three people are then you have no business being on this site and you should go back to watching the fucking Horse Whisperer. Now Englund and Todd are only in the film briefly, which is a crime in and of itself, but for Kane Hodder fans, there is no shortage of wild, violent growls, grunts and gesticulations.

I also think that this is one of the few slasher films where I actually give a shit about the main characters. Sure, you know that most of them are gonna get brutalized in the worst ways imaginable, but in a way, I was kinda sad to see some of them go. Marcus in particular became a favored character of mine, and I was really hoping that he would make it to the end. If nothing else, he breaks the latter day slasher tradition stipulating that at least one black character is guaranteed to survive the slaughter. This of course came about as a reversal of the infamous, yet somewhat inaccurate, cliché suggesting that  black characters always get whacked in horror films.

Keeping with that, I also appreciate the fact that the creators broke tradition and made the main character a dude instead of a chick. I’m pretty tired of the whole “Final Girl” trope. Yes, Marybeth is more intrinsically tied to the movie’s back-story, but Ben is the character that we are introduced to first, and the majority of the movie is shot from his perspective. Not that it really matters since it is doubtful that they even survive this flick. Ben might’ve made it. Marybeth is definitely a goner. I wouldn’t be surprised if Crowley is back inside his tool shed stump-fucking Ben’s arm hole or something. He really was horny for the guy.

Now before I go into the “Bad” section, let me just conclude by saying that Hatchet hit the fucking mark in every important way and exceeded my expectations tenfold. Adam Green is aces, and I will actively seek out any genre film that he’s involved with. Joel David Moore (Ben) was just enough of a freaky, little weirdo that I will likewise keep an eye out for flick that features him.

So quit fucking around! Rent this mutha fucka already! (Umm… after you finish reading this review of course).

The Bad: I’m even finding it difficult to levy any real criticism towards the elements of the film that I find fault with.  I think the biggest problem with Hatchet really comes down to  the central antagonist, Victor Crowley. Although he’s knighted with one of the most awesome names in all of moviedom, his story is quite derivative and borrows heavily from the popular slasher tropes of the late 1970s/early 80s. Let’s run it down: big, ugly, retard in the woods with severe parental issues and a penchant for hacking people up with various bladed instruments. Sound like anybody we know? Now in all fairness to writer/director Adam Green – he DID conceive of this character when he was only eight-years-old. To which I have but to say – props to you little Adam Green! It’s great to know that your diseased mind was poisoned during your formative years. You’re the kind of sickened twist-a-knob that we need more of in today’s society. Oh, but imagine what today’s generation would be like if we all developed our blackened dementia at such a tender age. Fuck, when I was eight-years-old, I was trying to think of creative ways to have my Princess Leia action figure make coitus with a Jawa. Retarded swamp monsters was the furthest thing from my mind. Adam Green, you’re my hero.

Back to Crowley. The problems with Crowley are not limited to lack of originality however. Kane Hodder leaps around in a big, foam rubber suit – and unfortunately, that’s what it ends up looking like: Kane Hodder prancing about in a big, foam rubber suit. While not a completely shabby job on the part of the FX team, the fakeness of it kinda draws me out of the picture a bit.   

In terms of directing and editing, I’ve found that there are several scenes that are longer than required and they reek with an odor of forced tension. When crafting suspense, I personally feel that it’s the director’s job to set up the sign posts and allow the audience to develop their own sense of foreboding. Having watched the DVD extras, I now know that this was done deliberately, and I suppose it works for some audiences, but it left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. Like a wedgie. In your ass. And it’s not even your underwear. Two scenes in particular that I think exceeded their expiration date was the opening prologue with Robert Englund and a later scene involving Marcus’ fearful inspection of a quivering bush (insert your own dirty analogy here, I’m not doing it for ya this time). While I’m grateful for any chance to see Papa Krueger on screen, the prologue was needlessly long. You could’ve easily trimmed five minutes out of this without losing any of its dramatic impact. The bush scene that I spoke of earlier takes place later in the film. Marcus and pals take note of some unidentifiable adversary, possibly Crowley, fucking about inside of a bush. The bush quivers. It shivers. It makes strange noises. Marcus inspects it more closely only to reveal a frightened raccoon. This type of false thrill has been done to death in horror flicks and even though the audience knows that it’s a tease, it’s prolonged to the point where they stop caring. That being said, the busy bush sequence DOES set you up for one of the most supremely kickass kills in the entire movie; death by gasoline-powered sander! Hmmm… gasoline powered sander. That’s another one that sounds like it should be the name of a heavy metal band. I’ll have to copyright that one as well. Note to self: Register the name Gasoline Powered Sander. Kill all who attempt to use it without paying me lots and lots of money.

I also disliked that Mercedes McNab’s death was off-screen. It’s almost a cardinal rule in horror films, which states in not-so-fine print, that the most annoying member of the cast has to die the most ridiculous death. And let’s not mince words, the character of Misty was designed to be over-the-top irritating and we really needed to see her innards turned into outterds. We know she suffers a horrific death and we do see the results of Crowley’s handiwork shortly after she disappears from the camera. But we don’t get to see the actual kill. In this, I feel cheated.

The only thing I can comment on here is the cock-tease in the opening credits. You set your audience up and have them drooling in their bedpans over the notion of seeing Kane Hodder, Robert Englund and Tony Todd all in one film together. Unfortunately, that’s not really what you get. Sure, Kane Hodder is all over the place, but Robert Englund is killed off in the first five minutes and Tony Todd, while freakin’ awesome, is so underused that it makes me want to hurt something small and innocent. Seriously, did Tony have something else to do that he couldn’t commit more time to this film? Unless he’s in the middle of filming Candyman 4: Candyman Needs Your Boobies, I can’t even conceive as to why he didn’t get more screen time. It’s Tony Fucking Todd for fuck’s sake! But hey, I’ll take what I can get. Even five-minutes of Tony Todd is better than no Todd at all.

Great Lines:

“You do know the vibrator goes in your cooch, not your ear, right?” -- Jenna

 “So he didn’t really work for Bayou Beavers?” -- Misty

 “He looks dead as shit!” – Marcus

 “Are you sure the number is 911?” – Misty

“Oh, shut up you redneck twat!” – Misty

Overall Rating: 8 out of 10 severed heads

Review published on March 3rd,, 2009