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This just in: 3-D is still cheesy. And unless the point of a horror film is to make you laugh -- and that is one school of thought -- then the least appropriate use for it is in that genre.
Case in point, My Bloody Valentine 3-D, a remake of the 1981 Canadian original, which itself was no masterpiece. I heard a lot more laughter at a public screening of this film (it's one of those the studio wouldn't pre-screen for critics) than I did at any of the Scary Movies.
Apart from hewing to old-school slasher rules as if they were the Talmud (example: You always trip when being chased by a psycho killer), the braintrusts behind My Bloody Valentine 3-D seem to have concentrated on coming up with things to shake at the audience, from the bloody to the benign, a la SCTV's Dr. Tongue. Sometimes, it's a flashlight, on another occasion it's a rifle ("Got me pointin' at shadows," the old codger played by Kevin Tighe laughs after showing the crowd the inside of the gun-barrel).
The apex of the 3-D experience in Bloody Valentine is an eye popping out of a socket -- at the audience -- from a pickaxe blow through the back of a head. Although this was done just as effectively, and hilariously, in 3-D in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein 35 years ago with a liver.
The crux of the skull-crushing is the tale of Harry Warden, a comatose survivor of a mine cave-in who turned out to have actually killed his fellows. Once out of the coma, he goes on an intestine-splattered killing spree at the hospital and leaves. "I wonder where he's headed," says the sheriff.
Oh! I know! He's headed where the teenagers are.
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One massacre and an apparent killer-killing later, there's a new sheriff in town named Axel (Kerr Smith), and a reappearance by the long-gone town rich-boy Tom (Supernatural's Jensen Ackles) who has returned to sell the town mine. Between them is Axel's wife and Tom's ex-girlfriend Sarah (Jaime King).
Oh, and the pickaxe murders start again, courtesy of a guy in a miner's outfit.
Is it Harry come back to life? Is is Tom? Or Axel? Or the old sheriff? Don't worry, you'll find out. In the meantime, it plays as if Jamie Lee Curtis stars instead of Jamie King. Somebody always gets the drop on the killer and whacks him in the head ... once ... and runs until they trip. Having knocked him down with a whack in the head, wouldn't you keep whacking until you're sure he's not getting up?
Apparently not. At least not in the kind of movie where a guy with a gun runs from a guy with a pickaxe.
(This film is rated 18-A)