A review of "Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet"

Confessions of a Film Junkie: a review of “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet”

By: Brian Cotnoir

    

I swear to your God that the writer and director of this film, Frank Sabatella, has one of the worst cases of Adult ADHD I have ever seen, and it shows.  This film is all over the place.  It’s like he started writing one horror film and then 20 minutes in decided to write a story to another horror film, and then 20 minutes after that he started writing the story to a different film!  Not to mention this film helped me set a personal best record for watching a film.  Normally I can guess the outcome to the plot of a film I’ve never seen before within 35-45 minutes, but for the film “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet” I shattered my old record.  Shortly after the 8 minute mark I accurately guessed how the film was going to end!  I hadn’t even been introduced to most of the main cast and within 8 minutes I predicted how this film was going to end.  Looking back that should have been my signal to skip the film entirely, because I already knew how it was going to end.  But you came to read a review of an awful horror film, and I’m going to deliver.         

Lizzie Borden Wannabe

    So “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet” is a 2009 Horror film that—like I said—is kind of all over the place.  It starts off in Long Island, New York in 1978, and a young girl named Mary “Hatchet” Mattock butchers her parents to death.  Why does Mary murder her parents? I don’t know, Frank Sabatella forgot to write in a motive, but that wasn’t going to stop him from carrying on with this crap fest of a film.  Actually to be fair, they briefly touch upon it in the opening credits that she has some condition that causes her to “Menstruate” excessively (Eeeeeeeeewwwwwwww!) and that somehow contributes to some massive psychological defect that causes her to become a mute homicidal maniac.                                             

What???

The film flashes forward to nine years later, and Mary’s now a young woman and is locked up in a room in a mental asylum...naked?  Why does the hospital let her sit around naked all day?  She wasn’t naked when they found her earlier in the film so why do they let her sit around her room naked all day long?  Any way’s I’m getting away from the plot, but I do have a valid point to make about this later.  So one night a security guard spots Mary sitting naked in her room and decides to go in and rape her.  Mary gets pregnant as a result of the rape, and all the Doctors in the hospital are outraged, but decide it’s in everyone’s best interest to not have the child aborted or have the guard fired and arrested (FYI, whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, keep your personal feelings about abortion OUT OF THE COMMENT SECTION!).  So Mary has her baby, but it “dies”.  So Mary becomes very upset and somehow manages to break out of her room and murder everyone who works in the Hospital.  How is that even possible?  For one thing, how did she break out of her room without making any noise or anyone noticing?  Second of all are you really trying to convince me that one woman in her early 20’s could not be stopped or slowed down and managed to kill every single employee of a mental hospital?  Yeah, I’m not buying it!  So Mary wanders out of the Hospital and is found by two cops wandering around the property naked with a severed head.  So despite not having any lethal weapons the police decide to open fire and kill Mary after she tosses the head at their car and begins to scream.  In the real world, both of those officers would be fired—or at least suspended—for using excessive force on an unarmed perpetrator.                         

Watch out for the Horror cliche fairy!

    The youth of Long Island decide to take this colorful incident and now every year on the anniversary of the massacre they hold an annual celebration of mischief and chaos known as “Blood Night”.  Yet, another thing in the film that makes no sense; this event is not like Halloween in Salem, MA or Sleepy Hollow, NY, it’s a festival to celebrate a killer.  What town would allow this?  I don’t think if you go to Plainfield, Wisconsin that they hold an annual festival celebrating the murders of Ed Gein, but again why am I wasting time on things in the film that don’t make any sense.  It’d be a lot easier—and a hell of a lot less stressful—to list all the things in this film that are done right!                                        

You're too good for this film, Bill.  What were you thinking?

So our main characters, and I call them characters instead of heroes because heroes is a term that implies that we actually like them, go to the cemetery where Mary is buried and try to contact the spirit of Mary Hatchet using a Ouija board (freaking cliché enough for you?!).  While in the cemetery they are spotted by the cemeteries loveable drunken caretaker “Graveyard Gus”, played by B-Horror Movie Legend Bill Moseley.  Gus tells the kids (and the films audience) the third different Legend of Mary Hatchet story in the film.  The kids leave Gus, and head back to the house for an alcohol fueled orgy, and that’s pretty much the next thirty minutes of the film.  You know for a film called “Blood Night”, there’s certainly not a lot of blood being shown.  There’s more hardcore nudity and sex scenes then murders scenes at this point in the film, and all I could think of during this part is I’m so bored, and can’t wait for people to start dying.  Oh another thing that this film does is make a big deal about how excited the kids are to watch “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” at the house.  I know there’s a taboo in film where you’re not supposed to reference better films in your own film, and it’s pretty sad that referencing a film as bad as “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” is implying that “Killer Tomatoes” is more credible then your film.                       

I expected better from you to, Ms. Harris

   At the party a new girl named Alissa has moved back to Long Island from Chicago.  She’s played by actress Danielle Harris, and is clearly the long lost daughter of Mary Hatchet who has returned to kill all the teens.  All right, I’m done wasting time talking about this films lack of plot, I’m speeding through.  So kids at the party start turning up dead, they think it’s the ghost of Mary Hatchet; it turns out its Alissa who is Mary’s long lost daughter.  She kills them all with a pick axe and scissors.  The End!                                                

What watching this film feels like!

Santa Maria this movie is bad!  And the reason why it’s so bad is that it has a story that’s all over the place.  It’s like three horror film plots trying to combine into one, not to mention has a lot of things that don’t make sense.  How does menstruating an excessive amount of blood (eeeeewwwwwwww!) turn you into a psychotic murder? And seriously what’s with the unnecessary nudity?  Even Mary’s ghost is seen wandering around naked, why is that?  Did the undertaker’s really think something like “Well no one’s coming to her funeral so why don’t we just not even bother to put a dress on her and bury her as is?”.  Or maybe it was contractual nudity stating that actress Samantha Siong had to appear nude for the part in the film, or you know maybe Frank Sabatella is just a pervert and wanted to exploit a pretty young woman on screen.  Don’t waste any time of this film, it’s a film so bad that not even Bill Moseley and Danille Harris could save it.  It’s Just Sucks.