Hatchet (film)
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Hatchet is a Troperiffic 2006 Slasher Movie written and directed by Adam Green (he also directed Frozen).
A long time ago, Victor Crowley was born in the Louisiana bayou horribly disfigured, becoming the butt of jokes among the other kids. One day, he is accidentally killed during a prank gone wrong, and his ghost continues to haunt the bayou. Years later, a haunted river cruise run by an inept boat pilot heads into a closed-off section of the river and runs aground, forcing the nine people on board to get off and hike back to New Orleans. Problem is, Victor's ghost still haunts these woods...
Hatchet was created as a throwback to the golden age of slasher movies in The Eighties, and it shows. It gleefully employs all of the tropes used by said movies, all while cranking the gore to almost-unthinkable levels (it had to go through two months of recuts to get an R rating). The film quickly gained a massive following among horror fans for its Reconstruction of the slasher genre, and a sequel was released in 2010.
A third film has been greenlit.
Tropes used in Hatchet (film) include:
- Accidental Murder
- Agony of the Feet
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: The reason why Ben's ex left him.
- Alpha Bitch: Both Misty and Jenna.
- American Accents: Marybeth has a Dixie accent, while Jim and Shannon have Upper Midwest-sounding accents (even though Jim is wearing a Panthers shirt).
- An Axe to Grind: Naturally.
- Backup Twin: Justin to Shawn in Hatchet II.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Brutally averted with Jenna, who gets the skin on her lower lip and chin ripped off with a sand belt.
- The Big Easy
- Black Best Friend: Marcus.
- Black Dude Dies First: Subverted. The Asian boat driver Shawn is the fourth one to bite it, while the black guy Marcus makes it to the final three.
- Blatant Lies: "We're not sinking!"
- Blood-Splattered Innocents: Victor's last act is coughing blood into Ben's face... or is it?
- Bolivian Army Ending: Victor climbs into the boat, kills Ben, rips his arm off, then pulls Marybeth out of the water screaming. Cut to black, roll credits.
- The sequel reveals that Marybeth escapes Victor.
- Chainsaw Good: Victor commits a horrible double Groin Attack with a gigantic redwood chainsaw in the sequel, combined with Half the Man He Used To Be. OUCH.
- Classically-Trained Extra: Jenna is an NYU graduate who is clearly upset that she's had to stoop to doing softcore porn. Only she was lying about being an NYU grad; she actually went to Hofstra University.
- This joke becomes a lot funnier if you grew up in Long Island and know about the reputation that Hofstra has as a party school.
- Clean Cut: Somehow performed with Victor's hatchet in the sequel.
- Continuity Nod: The sequel has a lot of them, even just during the opening credits.
- Cover Drop
- Crosscast Role: Young Victor in the flashbacks is actually played by a woman.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Pretty much every single death in both films. When you can say the guys who get their heads split in half or are decapitated are getting off easy...
- Cue Card: Shawn relies on these during the boat trip.
- Deadly Prank: Victor is killed as a result of other kids throwing fireworks at his house, setting it on fire. His father tried to go in to rescue him, but accidentally split his skull with a hatchet.
- Death by Sex: Layton and Avery in Hatchet II. He is decapitated while taking her from behind (which she fails to realize for a moment) and she gets an axe in an... uncomfortable place.
- Developing Doomed Characters: The first half of the movie.
- Don't Go in The Woods
- Dope Slap
- Dumb Blonde: Misty.
- Dwindling Party
- Eye Scream: In the opening to Hatchet II, Marybeth escapes Victor by shoving her finger into his eye.
- Facial Horror: Multiple deaths throughout the films have this.
- Fan Service: The first appearance of Misty and Jenna has them topless and making out. We get a few more shots of their bare breasts before the end of the movie. And then there's the Mardi Gras montage at the beginning...
- Final Girl: Marybeth, along with a Final Guy in Ben. Subverted when they go for a Kill'Em All ending, and double subverted by the sequel's revelation that Marybeth survived the Bolivian Army Ending.
- Flipping the Bird: Done by Marcus when asked to come down from the tree he just climbed up in terror.
- Freudian Slip: When Shannon asks what kind of movie Doug is directing, Doug asks her and her husband Jim if they've ever heard of Bayou Beavers. Jim replies yes, then suddenly switches his answer to no.
- George Lucas Throwback: To '80s slasher flicks.
- Gorn: Let's put it this way. A large percentage of the tropes on this page involve ways in which characters die, get injured, or spill blood.
- Gory Discretion Shot: The camera cuts to black and goes to the credits just before Marybeth's implied death. Subverted in that the sequel reveals that she survived.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: The first death in Hatchet II is Victor ripping out Jack Cracker's intestines and choking him with them so hard that his head explodes.
- The Grotesque: Victor Crowley.
- Guttural Growler: Part of the Reverend Zombie's act. He is played by Tony "Candyman" Todd after all.
- Half the Man He Used To Be: Jim gets chopped in half with a hatchet through his shoulder.
- Ainsley gets ripped in two in the opening.
- John and Vernon in Hatchet II. Also, Reverend Zombie, though this isn't what kills him.
- Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Shannon tilts her head and lets her mouth hang open once she sees Doug filming Misty and Jenna (off-camera) and realizes that he's a porn director.
- High-Pressure Blood: By the gallon.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: In the original, Victor is (temporarily) killed when he runs into a pole he threw into Ben's foot, impaling himself through the neck. In the sequel, he discards his own hatchet and Marybeth uses it to demolish his face.
- Hope Spot: Marybeth, Ben and Marcus set Victor on fire and think they've won... and then it starts raining.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday
- Immune to Bullets
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Jenna gets killed this way.
- Implacable Man: Victor gets shot, stabbed with a pitchfork, set on fire and impaled through the neck, and he still doesn't die. Justified in that he's a ghost... thing.
- Improbable Use of a Weapon: In Hatchet II, Victor kills Chad by bashing his face in with the top of his hatchet while he's on the ground.
- Intercontinuity Crossover: With Hack Slash.
- It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans
- It's Quiet... Too Quiet
- Jaw Breaker: Multiple times throughout both films.
- Jerkass: Doug Shapiro, the sleazy porn director, who turns out to be a marketing manager named Samuel Barrett who posed as a porn director only to build his own porn collection. And he's from New Jersey.
- Kill'Em All: The implied ending, although the sequel reveals that Marybeth survived.
- Kill It with Fire: Marybeth, Ben and Marcus try this. It doesn't work.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!
- Made of Plasticine: Most of Victor's victims have a number of limbs removed with ease.
- Man On Fire
- Mr. Exposition: Marybeth.
- Neck Snap
- Numbered Sequels
- Off with His Head: The fate of Shawn, Doug, Misty and Shannon. The last one gets her head torn in half. Damn, Victor sure does like his decapitations, does he?
- Offscreen Teleportation
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Both actresses who play Marybeth have their Dixie accent slip a few times. It's also done in-character by Parry Shen in both films.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse
- Phlegmings
- Pig Man: One of the kids in the flashback depicting Victor's death is dressed as one.
- Reconstruction: Of the slasher genre, after Scream's Deconstructive Parody of it followed by over a decade of Post Modernism.
- Sequel Escalation: The sequel's reel at ComicCon showed eight deaths, almost as many as there were in the original movie. The director promptly revealed that they hadn't even seen half of all the deaths that they had planned.
- Kane Hodder has gone as far as saying Hatchet 2 is the best horror film he's ever worked on.
- Shovel Strike
- Slasher Movie
- Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror: While the film is essentially a straight slasher flick, it has more comic relief than most, and its killings are so absurdly over-the-top it seems clear that the creators are being at least a bit tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing.
- Stealth Hi Bye
- Stock Scream: In the sequel, Cletus lets out a Wilhelm Scream when Victor Crowley yanks him out of a boat and into the water.
- Take That: The tagline boasts that the movie is "old school American horror" and that it isn't a remake, a Sequel, or based on a Japanese horror movie.
- Talk to the Fist
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: A lot of the deaths involve this trope, but a notable example is at the very end of Hatchet II, Marybeth makes sure Victor is good and dead by hacking his face into pulp with his own hatchet, and then when he twitches, by shooting what's left of his head with a shotgun. Do you blame her, though?
- Token Minority: Two of them -- the Black Best Friend Marcus and the Asian boat driver Shawn.
- Trailers Always Lie: Trailers make the film seem more serious than it is.
- Troperiffic
- Trophy Room: Victor's house.
- Valley Girl: Misty.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Shown twice. And again in the sequel.
- You Have Got to Be Kidding Me!: Said by Marcus right after the Hope Spot.
- Also said by Reverend Zombie in Hatchet II, when he sees his plot to kill Victor Crowley once and for all was a failure.
- You Killed My Father