My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Day 52 of Sobriety. 

 

I had always been curious about this film, I think largely because I’ve always liked the band of the same name. (It seems hard to believe, but the band say that the naming was a coincidence, apparently—claiming that they were aware of the film when they decided on the name.)

I have been watching quite a few “slasher” movies recently. Quite unusual for me, but I have enjoyed some of them a lot and I think I can now consider myself a fan of that sub-genre. The last one I saw, Happy Birthday to Me, was, like My Bloody Valentine a Canadian production from 1981 (well, a Canada-US co-production). That film fell flat with me, but not to be deterred I eagerly sat down for a sober Sunday evening with My Bloody Valentine.

It has a lot in common with Happy Birthday to Me (and, I suppose, 90% of slasher movies). In Happy Birthday to Me, the plot revolves around a group of high school students throwing a birthday party, who get picked off one-by-one by the killer, and in My Bloody Valentine, the plot centers on a group of young adults throwing a Valentine’s Day party who get picked of one-by-one by the killer (...well, OK, in at least one case, they got picked off two-at-time).

Something that also struck me as being an interesting kind of inverse-parallel between the two is that the high school “kids” in Happy Birthday all seemed to be strangely old—in at least their mid-twenties, whereas the young “adults” in My Bloody Valentine all behaved like particularly dense 13-year-olds. While I found the goofy immaturity of the protagonists to be pretty jarring, I have to say I really enjoyed My Bloody Valentine, and that it succeeded where Happy Birthday to Me failed miserably. That is to say that it did manage to generate a reasonable degree of tension, and it provided genuine pay-offs in its grisly kill scenes.

 

I watched the unrated version, by the way, not one of the more commonly available heavily censored versions. I imagine my enjoyment of the film would have been reduced to zero if had been another case of repeated big build-ups to…something happening off-camera. That’s a death-knell for slasher movies in my book. As it stands though, I'd probably rate My Bloody Valentine as one of the best 80s slasher movies I've seen, and I’m looking forward to watching it again.

From a sobriety point of view—there is LOTS of drinking all through the film! I think the movie must have been sponsored by Moosehead Lager, as it seemed to appear in almost every shot. Even if someone was just carrying some books or something, they would be carrying them in an old Moosehead box. I remember a couple of my friends and I went through a phase of drinking Moosehead when it became momentarily available in the UK when we were teenagers in the late 1980s. So, that was kind of nostalgic for me. The good old days when my drinking was a purely social pursuit and I would lose the urge to drink after two three pints of beer.