My Bloody Valentine (1981)

A lot of channels are going to be running horror movies this month. I recently had a free preview weekend of the Epix channels, and one of the movies they ran was the original 1981 version of My Bloody Valentine. It's going to be on Epix again tonight at 8:00 PM, so I made it a point to watch it as quickly as possible to do a post here.

The movie starts off with a seeming prologues as the credits run. Two miners walk through some of the tunnels in a coal mine. One of them takes the breathing mask off, revealing that it's a young woman, and these two people aren't miners, but young lovers who were able to get down here unnoticed for a romantic tryst. Except that as you can probably guess from the title, it turns out not to be so romantic. The other miner, never taking off his breathing apparatus, sticks his pickaxe in the wall. And then, as part of the love-making, he takes the young woman's body and impales it on the pickaxe!

Up on the surface, we're introduced to the mining town of Valentine Bluffs, Nova Scotia (not a real place and the location of Valentine Bluffs isn't revealed in the movie other then the obligatory end credits stuff; the movie was shot out on Cape Breton near Sydney, NS). Mayor Henniger, who also owns the local mine, is talking with Mabel, an older lady who runs the laundromat and who is putting up decorations for the town's Valentine's Day dance. It's going to be the first Valentine's Day dance in 20 years, and while the young people are excited, the older folks are mildly worried....

That's because, as the older bartender points out, the last dance 20 years ago resulted in tragedy. Some of the dance organizers were supposed to be looking after safety in the mine but neglected to do so in favor of the dance, which led to a methane explosion down below that trapped five minors, ultimately killing four of them and leaving the fifth, Harry Warden, to engage in cannibalism to survive. Warden wound up killing people and winding up in an insane asylum.

And then the sheriff gets a box of Valentine's candy in which the chocolates have been taken out and replaced by a human heart! The obvious implication is that Warden has escaped the asylum and is back to commit a reign of terror. When the sheriff calls the asylum, they've got no record that the guy was ever even in there, which frankly doesn't make sense to me, but this being a low-budget movie, don't take it too seriously. The sheriff and others are also getting warnings about what will happen if the Valentine's Day dance does go ahead.

As for the young people, looking forward to the dance is T.J., the son of the mayor and mine owner how has recently returned to town after leaving to try to make a success of life in the big city, which clearly didn't work. He left behind a girlfriend in the form of Sarah. But while T.J. was away, possibly never to return, Sarah decided that she was going to hook up with T.J.'s friend Axel, something which causes a lot of tension between the two men, to the point that Sarah thinks perhaps she should break things off with both of them.

After Mabel gets killed and her heart removed, the sheriff and mayor decide that they're going to have to cancel the Valentine's Day dance, no matter how much the young adults want it to go ahead. With the dance cancelled, the youngster decide to come up with the next best thing: go to the mine's rec hall and have a party there. Obviously none of these people ever saw a slasher movie, or they would know that this is a spectacularly bad idea.

One of the partiers gets drowned in a pot of hot dogs above ground and stuffed into a refrigerator, while some of the other partiers, not realizing this has happened, get the even more brilliant idea of taking the mine train down the shaft. When T.J. and Axel find out about this, they have to go down the shaft too, and sure enough, more people are getting killed down below.

My Bloody Valentine is, as I said, a low-budget slasher film, something borne out in part by the fact that I haven't mentioned the names of any of the actors. That's in part because I haven't heard of any of them before watching this movie. Indeed, Paul Kelman, who plays T.J., doesn't even merit a head shot on his IMDb page. But the movie is effective, at least if you want to be entertained. I suppose it would have been more frightening upon its release, when there hadn't been quite so many slasher films, and certainly not the parodies like Scary Movie. Decades after the genre has run a long course, parts of My Bloody Valentine are more darkly humorous -- we know enough of the tropes to know what's going to happen next.

That's not to say My Bloody Valentine isn't good. It's more than entertaining, as well as being atmospheric and claustrophobic since many of the mine scenes were shot in actual mines which were on the verge of being abandoned. So despite the low budget and cast of unknowns, My Bloody Valentine is a worthy addition to the slasher genre. It has received a DVD release and is available on Amazon Prime streaming, but I believe the DVD release is out of print. Note also that there was a remake a decade ago which is going to be on various channels in the Showtime family starting at the end of this week.