You know, I learned something about myself while watching the remake of My Bloody Valentine, presented in 3D and starring that one guy from Supernatural. (No, the other one.) Anyhow, what I learned is that if you create a movie in which a pickaxe goes through someone’s skull and his eyeball shoots halfway into the theater instead of just sitting flatly on the screen, that is pretty much everything I need that movie to do. If it chooses to also include a naked lady running around in anger and/or terror for a solid five minutes of screen time, well, that just goes to show that they understand what 3D is for.[1][2]

Now, would it be nice if they had also included solid dialogue, decent acting from anyone outside of the two male leads, and sufficient direction to get the actually good acting I’ve seen both of them perform in the past? Would it be nice if they had included a little bit more murder variation than the ubiquitous “pierced by pickaxe”? Obviously, yes; but I want to point out, again: eyeball halfway out into the audience. That is some awesome shit. Plus, y’know, completely gratuitous midget. I wonder if there is any full-on midgetsploitation in the horror genre? That could be worth seeing.

[1] That said, 3D porn I think might be a little scary.
[2] I will be the first to admit that I completely lose at feminism when it comes to horror movies. That part of my brain was hardwired long before I realized that there was even a question about gender equality, much less the second or three later when I came down on the side of yes, let’s do that equality thing. So, when I see a naked lady holding a gun on a scuzzy truck driver, or running away from a maniacal pickaxe killer, even though these things are objectively horribly exploitative and would basically never happen to a dude in a horror movie, I don’t care, because that’s what horror movies are, and while I’m probably wrong, I love them for it. I point this all out not so much in my own defense[3] as to give context to the end of the scene, when the naked lady is under an old, crappy motel bed, and the mattress is ripped off, leaving her to fend off the pickaxe killer with only a rusted mattress frame that basically made it look like she was naked and terrified in a chicken-wire cage.[4] It turns out that this is where I draw the line between “Awesome, horror movie nudity!” and “Dude, that’s kind of creepy and uncool.” Now you know!
[3] Because, it’s a really terrible defense. “No, your honor, it’s not that I’m okay with killing people. It’s just, in the context of me not liking this particular person, he pretty much had to be killed by me. Oh? Still guilty? Huh.”
[4] Which is the problem with the movie in a nutshell. It couldn’t decide whether to be campy, or a creepy torture-fetish thing, or psychological, or a mystery, or what. You can turn any of those into a pretty awesome horror movie, but you cannot turn all four of them at once into one. You’d be hard-pressed to pick two and succeed.[5]
[5] And now I’m including actual review material in the footnotes? That’s not cool.