My Bloody Valentine (1981)

“Roses are red, violets are blue, one is dead, and so are you.” – Valentine card message

And here we go. Let’s get the party started with this holiday themed stalk’n’slashfest.

And that was the thing in the eighties, there seemed to be a holiday killer for most holidays. Valentines, April Fool’s, birthdays, Christmas, Halloween, summer months where the 13th fell on a Friday. Thankfully, they didn’t go with a Bar Mitzvah slasher.

So, in 1981 the trend was just getting started, hot on the heels of a little independently made, low budget film by John Carpenter set at Halloween. Paramount joined in the fun in 1980 with Friday the 13th, and hoped they’d get another hit with My Bloody Valentine in 1981. The film was actually profitable, but not on the scale the studio executives hoped, so in future, Paramount would continue with a series of sequels to Friday the 13, but abandon this one.

When I saw this the first time, it was in a series of horror double bills that ran at my local cinema – before the days of multiplexes. I saw some amazing films during that week, including Happy Birthday to Me, The Burning, Dressed to Kill and a few others. This of course was back when these films were relatively cheap to rent and show for a couple of nights. Also, it must’ve been 1981 or early 1982 because I didn’t have a video recorder and I hadn’t started my obsessive film collecting yet. (That, incidentally, is still a work in progress forty years on.)

So that puts my initial encounter not long after I saw Halloween for the first time on TV (But more of that later on in the season.)

My Bloody Valentine obeys the rules of most slasher films, which were adhered to so often in the eighties, they became cliches. There’s a killer whose identity we don’t know for sure, so we have several suspects. The killings are based on a prior event or local urban legend. The victims are young and horny. If you go off alone, you ain’t comin’ back. And more often than you’d think – there’s a special date on the calendar involved. In this case, the clue’s in the title.

What sets this one apart from the usual run of the mill slasher is its unique location. This movie was actually filmed in Nova Scotia, with plenty of its scenes actually films more than 2000 feet underground in a disused mine, and though the plot is what it is, very effective use is made of the mine.

As the film starts, we see a couple of miners deep underground. They’re wearing helmets, goggles, breathing equipment due to the possible presence of methane, boiler suits, the whole nine yards. One takes off the heavy gear, revealing herself (see what I did there?) to be a scantily clad blonde woman, who begins to seduce the other miner. He retaliates by skewering her with his pick axe!

Well, all righty, that’ll get a slasher movie off to a good start. (I’m not going to waste time pointing out the sexist misogynism of most slasher movies containing violence against women being perpetrated by men. If you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you already know all that and don’t need reminding. I’m not condoning such violence in real life or from a sociological point of view, I’m just here to talk about horror movies.)

We’re in the small mining town of Valentine Bluffs, population a couple of hundred (and about to get fewer) and the time of year is February 12. The town is gearing up to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a dance at the local hall. This is the first Valentines dance in twenty years, because 20 years ago, Valentine Bluffs suffered a great tragedy. Two supervisors employed at the mine left five miners underground while they attended the dance. They had neglected to check the methane levels. There was an explosion which trapped the miners underground. Only one survived – Harry Warden. And to survive the days he spent trapped before the rescuers reached him, he had to resort to cannibalism! This drove him insane. A year later, he murdered the two supervisors, cut out their hearts and put them in heart shaped Valentine candy boxes with a warning never to hold another Valentine’s dance or Harry would return to kill again.

Twenty years later, these idiots think they’re free and clear and deck the entire town out in Valentine decorations and reintroduce the dance. Their first clue is when the mayor of the town who is also the owner of the mine receives a package. A heart shaped package containing a human heart, presumably that of the blonde we saw in the mine earlier.

The second warning is poor old Mabel, the organiser of the dance and proprietor of the local laundrette, who ends up with her heart in a box which is sent to the Sheriff, while the rest of her is stuffed into one of her own tumble driers on high heat (those stains aren’t coming out in a hurry).

The dance is cancelled and the decorations are ordered to be pulled down. So, you’d think that’d be an end to it – right?

Nope. The young people want their dance, damn it – Harry Warden or no Harry Warden.

Now I say young people, normally in these movies, the victims are horny teenagers. In this, they’re easily mid to late-twenties at the very least, all males employed by the mining company, all females similarly aged seemingly involved with miners. And they are, without a single exception, stupid to the point of being dumb and none of them come across as remotely even likeable. Even the lead, T.J. (Paul Kelman) has the personality of a cinder block. His rival Axel (Neil Affleck who later turned to animation and directed 7 episodes of The Simpsons) comes across as a swaggering, petulant bully. God only knows what the object of their affections Sarah (Lori Hallier) sees in them, but then she hasn’t exactly been gifted with a personality either. The rest of the cast are as bad. To the extent that when they decide to hold the dance actually AT THE MINE, it’ll come as a relief that we know they’re not all going to make it, leaving the gene pool at Valentine Bluffs a little less murky.

Yes – this wise lot decide to hold their party at the mine where the legend of Harry Warden started, twenty years later. This is T.J.’s bright idea – seeing he’s the mayor and mine owner’s son. No good will come of this, mark my words. Somehow, they get to the mine, play their loud music, have all the light on, cook food, basically wander off in couples…and the Sheriff doesn’t notice.

The miner makes an appearance and starts to thin the herd. He forces a guy’s head into a large pan of boiling hot dogs before beheading him and putting the severed head in the fridge to be found later on. A girl is skewered in the shower, another guy is killed with a nail gun to the cranium, a couple are impaled on a drill…then the chase is on, down in the mines. At one point, it’s a bit like watching a Scooby Doo chase as they try to avoid “Harry” – but is it really Harry?

No, the killer is actually Axel – the son of one of the supervisors Harry had murdered the year after his ordeal in the mine on Valentines, and as a young child, Axel had seen the killing of his father. Watching from under his bed and it drove him insane. Harry Warden had died in the asylum five years earlier, as explained by the police who arrive just in time to help T.J. and Sarah out of the mine to safety, leaving Axel trapped under some debris. But as rescuers arrive, Axel amputates his own arm to free himself from the rubble – he runs away deeper in to the abandoned old mine workings, laughing maniacally threatening that both he and Harry will be back.

Strangely though, it was one of a few slasher films that DIDN'T spawn a fleet of sequels, so he's still down there...laughing.