Bloody Ridiculous

I'm glad 3-D movies are coming back in style. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do with the technology and that good stories can be told using it. Having said that, My Bloody Valentine 3-D is two steps in the wrong direction. You expect 3-D movies to do certain things with the format and play with the audience but the first rule of 3-D film making should still be the first rule of all film making. Make the movie good first. Last year I was pleasantly delighted with Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D. The story made sense, the motivations were there. The premise and world created by the movie were already over the top and well suited for a 3-D presentation, but what made it good and Valentine the converse of good is that Journey used 3-D to accentuate the movie and make it better and Valentine built the movie around having 3-D kills in it. I'll refrain from saying anything about the "story" of the movie as it has the word "bloody" in the title and people die painful deaths. Eyeballs are poked out at us, body parts fly at us, and fire jumps out at us, but none of these things made the movie any good. In fact the only "good" use of the format was at the hospital aftermath scene in the beginning where the camera moves around with full depth of field showing mutilated body parts, blood and destruction after the crazed killer wakes up from his coma to pick up where he left off. They could have done more in the claustrophobic environments of the mine to really help bring home the fear, or show some more depth of field in what was going on around the characters, but instead they chose to go with cheap thrills that were done much better in the '80s and early '90s when Jason, Freddy, and Mike Myers were carving people up every year. Not recommended even if you like 3-D. D+/4.5/40