News
Late to the Party: ‘Hatchet’ (2006)
Welcome, my spooky darlings, to another edition of Late to the Party! While your friendly neighborhood iHorror authors are well-versed in the realm of all things horror, we do have to admit that – from time to time – a classic film will slip through the cracks. For this week’s confession, I had never before seen Adam Green’s classic swampy slasher, Hatchet.
Now, I had admitted this previously when covering the surprise fourth film in the franchise, Victor Crowley, at Toronto After Dark (read my review here). Conveniently, my lack of familiarity was not a problem as the newest film fills in enough of the backstory. But! I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to go back to the very beginning (a very good place to start).
Adam Green’s Hatchet is a love letter to 80s slasher horror. The ensemble cast features some of the genre’s A-list stars, Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Tony Todd (Candyman), and Kane Hodder (Friday the 13th parts VII through X) as the hatchet-wielding butcher himself.
The plot is pretty simple – a group of tourists in New Orleans take a nighttime swamp tour, unaware that they are about to walk right into the lair of a supernaturally cursed and hideously deformed man with a penchant for vengeance (and a mighty thirst for carnage). As the shocked sightseers try to work together for survival, they are picked off one by one.
We follow Ben (Joel David Moore, Avatar) who – after a recent breakup – convinces his best friend Marcus (Deon Richmond, Scream 3) to leave the busty scenery of Mardi Gras for a haunted swamp tour. On the way, they meet Marybeth (Amara Zaragoza, Perfect Stranger), who is the only passenger on the tour who seems to know what they’re in for.
The main characters are likable enough, but the cannon fodder serve their purpose well.
The kills are deliciously creative and wonderfully satisfying. I was brought back to a time when a victim’s most timely demise would invoke squirms from gore and squeals of glee from the audience. Hatchet may not be a deeply cognitive film, but it makes up for it in pure fun.
As a love letter to 80s splatter, all of the film’s effects are practical. Personally, I felt that the brutal and incredibly hands-on kills are Hatchet‘s strongest feature, so the realistically visceral tears and gashes are everything you could ask for.
Kane Hodder is always a force to be reckoned with. His physicality is a blessing to the horror genre and he delivers a quiet gravitas that’s unparalleled. It’s fantastic to see him in these imposing and hyper-focused roles as he can be genuinely scary and animalistic.
When director Adam Green pairs this unbridled strength with his personal comedic timing, it’s a treat.
Hatchet shows that Green really gets horror comedy in its best form. It doesn’t dumb down the horror for the sake of the comedy – it utilizes comedy to accentuate the absurdity of the horror.
So, overall, I’m convinced. I need more of this.
Join us next Wednesday for another round of Late to the Party. Christopher McManus Jr will be watching Aliens for the very first time.
Featured image via Chris Fischer
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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News
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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