As we all know, the only thing that keeps unruly teens in line is their occasional mass slaughter. Cinematically speaking at least.
Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is an unremarkable yet competent tale featuring the requisite debauchery, drunkenness and gore required to momentarily amuse. Totally forgettable but fine for a scary movie marathon.
Mary was a local girl whose ‘big change’ in her teenage years arrived when she transitioned from a broody daughter to a bloodied catatonic girl, a suddenly self inflicted orphan. Predictably enough, young Mary is forcefully hospitalised, where in the years that follow she is subjected to all kinds of heinous abuse which leaves her even more sullen, beaten and eventually impregnated. After losing the baby in childbirth, Mary’s escape attempt is violent and ultimately fatal, the stuff of legend…
… and so the small town comes to acknowledge the annual ‘Blood Night’, complete with a local holiday and a bunch of kids doing what kids do to commemorate things; be dicks.
One such party has the usual matching number of over-confident young males and limber young females flaunting themselves, all imbibing copious amounts of liquor and urging each other to do silly things sexual and depraved.
Mary, in all of her pasty naked glory, seems to resent missing out on the festivities, a fact she doesn’t handle well.
Apparently the human body is filled with enough intestines that if laid out in a line they would be as long as a semi trailer. That claim is tested here repeatedly, with innards frequently being outed, limbs being severed and of course young heads are lifted from shoulders.
Blood Night is short and formulaic, but it gets the formula right, and the brevity is always appreciated with these films. When the only requirements are blood, tits and gore, you don’t need The Lord of The Rings running time, eighty minutes does the trick.
Coincidentally about the same time that will elapse before you have forgotten the viewing.
Final Rating – 7 / 10. Not so much ‘legend’, but you could do a lot worse.
