My Bloody Valentine (2009)

So this year we’re doing reviews of remakes of movies we’ve already reviewed over the past 73 years of doing this. We hope you enjoy it as much as we don’t.

My review of the original

Trailer: 

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s This About: A raucous British man makes a pub bet that he can find his true love by the end of February 14th. Where is his bloody valentine??

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• A mine disaster! BURIED ALIVE!
• These are the most exciting shots of a newspaper I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture.
• Anyway, like in the original, Harry Warden kills a bunch of his fellow miners so they don’t breathe the precious mine air that is rightfully his. But that doesn’t work out great for him. Anyways, he’s in a coma then he wakes up because he has a mine dream. 
• A nurse goes into his room and can’t find him, but doesn’t simply look slightly to her right at the other bed, where he is sitting, and probably smells like shit.
• Tom Atkins!!! Now maybe this movie will thrill me!
• Apparently Harry viciously slaughtered everyone in the hospital. Ok, but he’s just a regular dude of regular dude strength. There’s no security there that could’ve possibly stopped him?
• Oof, Tom Atkins and his 110-year-old cop friend are delivering their lines like they’re reading them off the back of a bottle of Geritol while sitting on the toilet.
• Teens are partying by the mine. What a romantic location in which to get laid.
• Hey it’s Soldier Boy.
• This movie is from 2010 but this teen party scene is straight out of 1997.
• Ooh, pickaxe through the back of the eyeball. Good shot. I’ll say this, this movie isn’t screwing around. I thought we’d be getting a lot of insufferable teen talk for 20 minutes, but here we are with the slaughtering.
• “Jason, is that you?” Wrong movie, shithead.
• Ha, the shovel to the mouth kill was silly but good clean fun.
• Ohhhhh, right, this movie was made for 3D, hence the pickaxe flying at the screen. What a dumb era that was.
• Soldier Boy’s friends just flatleft him.
• Oh good, the Active Adult Police showed up just in time to save him. They shoot Harry multiple times in the back, but it has little effect. Again, even the insane have normally functioning musculoskeletal systems. See: Halloween Kills.
• He runs off into the mine. This is kind of the issue I had with the original, where’s he gonna go? Get the SWAT team at the entrance and he either comes out and you shoot him or he starves to death.
• Oh, now it’s 10 years later, The news says the mine collapsed on him. How?

• Now the friend who flatleft Soldier Boy is the sheriff, even though he’s only 19.
• Cool a non-white character. I was getting a little worried.
• Teen Sheriff is cheating on his smoking hot wife with a still attractive but a slight notch below girl in a creepy abandoned house. Again, for a movie about Valentine’s Day the romantic elements are off the charts.
• Oh Soldier Boy’s family owns the mine? Ok. His dad’s buddy is none too happy about it, and neither will be the town, he decree. This is the same plot as Slap Shot.
• This full-frontal nude girl banging some random guy in a shitty love motel provides a great succinct explanation of the history of Valentine’s Day. More classes should be taught like this.
• Haha, she threw a gun at her lover and it flew towards the screen. So stupid.
• A new mine killer pickaxes the guy through the head as he gets in his tractor trailer. How long was he going to wait in there? How did he know that the guy wasn’t going to sleep there? It is a motel, after all.
• The miner kills a dwarf! You would think he would respect dwarves and their proud tradition of mining!

He’s killed before and will kill again. There used to be 12 dwarves…

• I think we’re being led to believe that Soldier Boy is the miner, you dig?
• The miner is stealing hearts, quite literally. At least she was already nude so it saved him some time.
• Oh the full-frontal girl was Teen Sheriff’s girlfriend in the teen party mine scene, and Soldier Boy’s then-girlfriend is now Teen Sheriff’s wife. I can draw a diagram if you need.
• Ok now we have the 20 minutes of teen drama, even though they’re all 10 years older now. 
• Teen Sheriff’s son is also dressed up like a sheriff and now I can’t tell them apart.
• Here’s the Active Adult Police again, 10 years later and looking exactly the same, even though they would now be in their 200s.
• Now this is a cross between Dawson’s Creek and Slap Shot. Slap Creek, or I Shot Dawson.
• Soldier Boy is under suspicion because he crossed the window when the trucker was filming the sex tape and you know what zzzzzzz.
• Soldier Boy goes down into the mine to meet someone and I’m not sure why it couldn’t have waited until that person was out of the mine but I guess it was just so Soldier Boy could be attacked by the miner. But he gets locked in a cage and it’s going to look like he killed whoever the miner kills, of course. 
• So yeah the other miners come and find the body of the guy who took Soldier Boy into the mine and even though SB is locked in a cage they still grab him and yell, “What did you do??!!”
• So our only other miner suspects here are Teen Sheriff and a handful of old men. But I’d classify the old men as a minor threat.
• Aside from the miner putting a human heart in a valentine box or two, this really doesn’t have much to do with Valentine’s Day. And there doesn’t seem to be any real good reason for him to do that.
• Man this movie is about 25 minutes too long. At least there hasn’t been a bad 3D effect in a while. But we’re overdue.
• Oh nevermind, there’s like three in a row.

• Oh Soldier Boy is still the prime suspect even though they said it wasn’t him because of being locked in the cage. I mean he could still be but that wouldn’t make much sense for them.
• Now the miner is in the supermarket. I watched this movie last year.
• So the miner goes after Teen Sheriff’s two women, his wife escapes, but TS gets there seconds later and by then the miner has already cut out the mistress’s heart, put it in a box, and wrote “Be My Valentine” in blood. WHEN?
• I guess the deputy (the lone person of color I mentioned) is also acting suspicious, but what would his motive be? Maybe his request to have more minorities live in the town was rejected?
• The miner attacks the nanny at Teen Sheriff’s house. WHY? 
• Teen Sheriff’s house has like three front doors.
• The nanny’s all burned in the dryer, which is a callback to the original, but it makes much less sense because she wouldn’t have been in there that long.
• No not Tom Atkins! I am not thrilled.
• Teen Sheriff thinks its Solider Boy because it’s revealed that Soldier Boy has been in a mental institution for the past 7 years. I feel like I’ve been in a mental institution every October for the past 11 years.
• We’re back at Axel’s dad’s creepy abandoned house again, and there are a bunch of valentine boxes, which is suspicious, but maybe he’s just a raging chocoholic?
• Now TS’s wife is chased back to the mine, of course. Don’t miners work in shifts around the clock? There would be somebody there, right?
• Oh, so it was Soldier Boy this whole time? He has a split personality that’s Harry Warden? And the kill we saw from his POV was in his head? Why?? Based on what?? I mean, bold move making the guy that was built up to be suspected this whole time the killer. Or maybe bold isn’t the word, maybe lame as shit is the word. 

• So Soldier Boy fights Teen Sheriff and roughs him up, and even though his wife was pointing a gun at SB the whole time she does absolutely nothing to help until it’s too late.
• At least we get a 3D bullet. When they made this did they think it would never not look ridiculously stupid?
• Anyway there’s an explosion and Soldier Boy gets trapped and kills a rescuer and escapes and Teen Sheriff and his wife declare their love for each other even though he was cheating on her for several months.

Final Thoughts: Ehhhhh, it’s fiiiiine, sort of. It does differ from the story in the original, which was the miner was pissed because the town dipshits insisted on holding a Valentine’s Day dance in the mine. In this version, Soldier Boy is just a crazy person? No other real motive. Also, none of the kills in this are nearly as good as the ones in the extended cut of the original. I think this will be a recurring thought this month, but it’s all style over substance, which some who are still in various grades of school might prefer, but not this grizzled old miner.

Score: 4.5 Drops of Sweet Valentine Blood (out of 10)

Which Was Better?: The original eeks out a miner win.