Horrorfest 2023: My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine

Screenplay by John Beaird

Directed by George Mihalka

Starring Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck, Don Francks, Cynthia Dale, Alf Humphreys, Keith Knight and Patricia Hamilton

Canada, 1981

For the fifth year in a row now I've attended the Hollywood Theater's All Night Horror Movie Marathon. Each year in advance of Halloween they show four movies from 9:00 Saturday evening until about 5:00 Sunday morning. You never know what four movies they're going to be until they start. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're so bad they're good and sometimes they're just plain bad. Needless to say, I love it.

This year, they started off with MY BLOODY VALENTINE, a slasher I've never seen before. This is one in a long line of HALLOWEEN imitators, picking a holiday or significant date and plotting a horror movie around it. Of course, none of HALLOWEEN's imitators were as good as the real thing, but some were better than others. I'd say MY BLOODY VALENTINE isn't the worst of the lot but it's not great, either.

The movie makes lousy use of Valentine's Day as a setting. The film takes place in a mining town called Valentine Bluffs. So, because of the name, their annual Valentine's Day dance is a big deal. Only they haven't held the dance for twenty years because the last time they did, the only survivor of a mining accident went on a kill-crazy rampage and left a warning for the town never to hold another dance again -- OR ELSE. Twenty years later and the town decides, what the hell, let's have a dance after all, and the bodies start piling up as a killer wearing mining gear stalks the town. It's immediately assumed this is the same killer from decades before, freshly escaped from the mental institution.

What screams Valentine's Day more than a killer in mining gear, right? Right. Well, the grown adults of the town want a Valentine's Day dance so much that they decide to hold their own party, at the mine. Here I thought, "A party in a mine? Are you crazy?" But, the characters went on to say the mine is great -- it has a snack bar and a gaming table and all this stuff. So I think, "All that stuff... in a mine?" Turns out what they mean is that all that stuff is on the surface of the Earth, near the mine. So I breathed a sigh of relief, until about halfway through the party when everyone gets bored and decides to go into the mine, anyway.

The whole time I was wondering why they didn't just do the obvious thing and make it like, say, a high school Valentine's Day dance, and have some incel who was jilted or bullied or both with a vendetta against young high schoolers in love, or something like that. You know, something other than blue collar mine workers.

Now, you might say, well, that high school idea is actually more of a rip off of HALLOWEEN and other slashers than this one is, so you should be happy it's more original. I guess. I just wish it had more to do with its own premise. If you call a movie MY BLOODY VALENTINE, you gotta have wall-to-wall Valentine's Day action. Not miners.