Starring: Aaron Bernard, Rebecca Hartley, Shayna Hickman, Mike Valley

Written By: Eddie Mahalick, Justin Sago

Directed By: Eddie Mahalick

Grade: C-

Hatchet Jack has a very stylistic opening. We are shown flashes of the infamous serial killer, Hatchet Jack, next to his murdered and very lifeless victims. These flashes come quick and rapidly, coupled with the sharp noise of blades being sharpened. The film is largely black and white, but occasionally we get one sharp, lone color, contrasting the dim, black and white coloring of everything else in the scene. Through this we are given sudden images against sharp static sounds. Many of these are morbid and gory images of Hatchet Jack’s handy work. We are given a lot of decent blood through all of the dead, cold corpses. We have detached heads and limbs and hatchet induced bloodshed, against the backdrop it seems all the more cold and like the work of a brutal and vicious serial killer.

That being said this doesn’t just stay in the opening sequence though, it encompasses the whole film. It may sound like a good thing that the artistic direction didn’t just remain in a small portion of the film, but it gets distracting pretty quickly. There are just such a large number of manipulated edits one right after the other without giving much of a break in between. There’s speed ups, slow motion edits, black and white to color shots, freeze frames, overlapping images, dissolving images, rapid edits, quick flashes, sudden jarring sounds, and several other editing techniques couples one after the other. I was hoping this wouldn’t get too excessive, but unfortunately I was quickly proven wrong. You can tell there was a lot of playing around with the editing, which might have been fun and do offer some meaning and effectiveness in bringing the audiences in to the atmosphere of the film.

Still, the effects become so overdone and forced that they begin to lose their value and are just seem to be there for the sake of having an artsy edit. As we get farther in to the film, their distraction doesn’t come off as being so bad though. The story is overly simple, like many other lost in the woods in the midst of an urban legend killer who turns out to be real plotted films. The characters aren’t the most likeable either so at times all though the effects end up losing most of their significance; they’re more jarring and pleasing to the eye then the mundane characters and the simple story that doesn’t add much to far superior films that fall in to the same sub-genre of horror.

As I said the story is pretty average. A few locals are talking of the legend of Hatchet Jack in a bar together, which is a decent opening, giving us an introduction of the killer and certain people’s fascination with coming close to the legend. In reality they are looking for some fun while acting like they are looking for trouble, while they really have no intentions of any real danger. Particularly the film focuses on 4 teenagers (Aaron Bernard, Rebecca Hartley, Shayna Hickman, Mike Valley ) looking for a good time and do this by going the same path and to several locations that Hatchet Jack was said to have gone through, taking many innocent lives. Soon enough, they realize that Hatchet Jack is very real and they are about to be his next victims. That’s about all there is to the plot, which could describe a number of other horror movies. It had the potential to be a lot more, but Hatchet Jack doesn’t really go that extra to step to give us something different or expand on the simple sub-genre it lies in.

The acting isn’t anything great and the characters are empty, unlikable and have little redeeming quality to them. We even learn that one of the main characters has cancer and doesn’t have much longer to live. This should have affected the characters and presented some sort of a dramatic or emotional depth to the film, but there is very little done with this information. The original film was 90 minutes long rather than the 45 minute running time. This would have given the film a bit more time to develop the story and characters further. Maybe it would have been more of the same thing, but at least the film would have had the appropriate time to build the story. Also, it really feels lacking since it is void of a climax. We see them on the quest, some great tension and fear is built, and then we see the aftermath of their deaths. We don’t get to see any chase scenes, capturing, torturing, and we aren’t along for the ride. We don’t get to see how Hatchet Jack works, how he kills these kids, or how he is composed when he is doing it. We lose a great part of Hatchet Jack as a villain in taking this approach. Seeing the aftermath of the deaths do serve as a striking image, but they could have been a lot more.

The atmosphere of the film is one of the better elements the film has going for it. The woods are dark, creepy, and closed in. More importantly it’s Hatchet Jack’s territory. They’re walking across the same land that he has and furthermore it’s his killing ground and hope. It’s clear that they don’t have much hope. This landscape creates the tension and atmosphere that lead up to their deaths and prove that Hatchet Jack is more than a just a myth. By the kids looking for him and getting what they wish for, it almost presents a territorial quality and motive for the murders. Hatchet Jack has a striking atmosphere, artistic but far too excessive editing, a shallow story and characters, and doesn’t live up to the potential that it showed it had earlier on in the film.