Review of Hatchet

Hatchet is billed as 'a return to old school American horror', which should surely mean the Gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe, but since it often seems that American teenagers (this film's target audience) regard anything that happened before they were born as being ancient history, in this context it means the slasher films of the Seventies and Eighties. So Hatchet has a group of teenagers, young twentysomethings and an elderly married couple stranded in a swamp and being hunted by a hulking, musclebound, deformed and seemingly unkillable psychopath. Unsurprisingly the elderly couple are first to go, because who wants to look at stupid icky old people - I mean, they're all wrinkly and gross, right kids? And even more unsurprisingly, amongst the imperilled group are two shapely airheaded bimbos (one played by Buffy and Angel's Mercedes McNab) who bare their breasts at every opportunity because they're making a softcore gonzo porn flick. Incidentally, to publicise Hatchet McNab posed for a photoshoot that appeared in Playboy in late 2006 to coincide with the movie's release – but this nifty piece of cross-promotion was derailed by Hatchet's release being delayed by almost a year (it finally crept into American cinemas in the Autumn of 2007).

Although well made, Hatchet is just too knowing, too post-modern, and too tongue-in-cheek to be effective. The blood and gore is ludicrously overdone, with repeated shots of severed limbs and internal organs flying through the air and splattering against tree trunks. I don't have a problem with gory films, but here there's a laziness and cynicism to the bloodletting, as though the producers believe that body parts waved often enough at the camera are all that's needed to keep the audience happy. In summary, Hatchet is a huge disappointment.