Filmmakers on the low-budget end of the horror genre have to employ certain tricks to create a visually intense final product that can rival those with more funding. Sometimes they get very creative to squeeze value from every last penny, which leads to innovation; but sometimes they resort to methods that make the film all but unwatchable and turn off the audience that took the chance on their film. Writer and Director Frank Sabatella should consider himself lucky if any audience is willing to watch his work ever again after the travesty that is Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet, a film devoid of clever twists and filled with horrible acting, clichéd writing, and some of the worst visuals to come out of the horror genre in recent memory.
The film opens with the child Mary who slaughters her parents, and then jumps forward about 15 years to find her huddled naked in an insane asylum just a night guard comes in to rape her in an utterly tasteless and unnecessary scene. We see her give birth only to learn the child is stillborn. Then Mary kills a bunch of people, breaks out and is shot down. Fast forward another 15 years or so and Mary’s death has become a local holiday akin to Halloween where teenagers egg houses, drink, and engage in all other manner of debauchery. This year it’s different and as you might have guessed, the teens start dying gruesome deaths. Is Mary’s ghost back for revenge?
Save for Danielle Harris, the cast is comprised of actors incapable of delivering lines without an inordinate amount of embellishment, though the dialog Sabatella has committed them to has all the inspiration of balsa wood. It’s there just to pass the time from the establishment of the premise to the final fifteen minutes where people start dying. The span in between would be tolerable if the twist wasn’t so glaringly obvious from the first 5-minutes onward, but Sabatella’s story is based on a cliché so overused that to not guess it outright would require you to not have seen a film in the last 50 years.
Furthermore, the way Sabatella chose to show the scenes of death, super-imposed with red tints in brief flashes so as to cover his inability to capture a long-form death in a meaningful or visually impressive way, destroys the impact of virtually every death in the film. He made a horror film and then obscured the sequences that should be contributing the horror. Except for the rape scene, of course, which he felt should be shown without his visually disruptive filter. Blood Night suffers from one poor filmmaking choice after another, and there’s nothing to redeem it beyond Danielle Harris who arrives too late and whose identity is far too easy to divine.
DVD Bonus Features
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the most valuable things a director can do when he’s created a film monstrosity is to provide a healthy dose of extras so aspiring filmmakers can see where they went wrong. Luckily, Sabatella has done just that by giving us two production-centric elements besides a blooper real which is inescapably more entertaining than the film itself (not a hard feat). The basic “making of” featurette lets you see which cameras they used (which contributed to the films shoddy appearance) and you get to see Sabatella’s style of directing. The second featurette of value is a series of interviews with Sabatella and the cast members. Hearing Sabatella talk about his method and vision for the film is at once perplexing and revealing. On one hand you hear what he thinks he accomplished versus what you saw on the screen, and on the other hand you get to hear the choices he made which explain a lot of the film’s central issues. The cast interviews come with the same “what not to do” kind of lessons that serve as an eye-opener as they seem to think they’ve created something much different from what the audience sees.
"Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet" is on sale June 14, 2011 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Frank Sabatella. Written by Elke Blasi (screenplay), Frank Sabatella. Starring Bill Moseley, Danielle Harris.
