Man, I really loved the first two Hatchets, so I was super pumped for this. Unfortunately it's just not that good.
It still has the winks and nods and fun kills of the first two, but there's just too much story here, story that's not very compelling at all.
The film picks up right at the end of Hatchet 2, Zack Galligan of Gremlins fame plays the local sheriff who sends a bunch of his men out to the swamp to deal with the massacre. So cops and EMT's show up and all hell breaks loose again. The kills are fun at first but eventually the barrage of tongue in cheek just gets a little nerve wracking. It's the 3rd time we've seen this stuff and it just feels like, OK, show me something different.
The dialog is the same way. It's funny at first when all the horror movie tropes are being pointed out by the cast, but it's so fucking verbose at times. We get it, we know why it's funny, we saw the first two movies. Maybe I was more irritated than I thought.
Anyway, the problem is that even when those parts of the movie are fun, they aren't focused on for very long. The main cruxt of the film is a newswoman, dead set on killing Victor Crowley, has a theory about his dads ashes and returning them to him to make his ghost killable, and it's rather insufferable. It isn't made any easier by the fact that the actress playing her is just nails on a chalkboard to listen to.
The beauty of the first Hatchet was how much fun it had with it's kills and characters, but as the franchise has progressed it's become more about the story, which was never all that interesting on it's own. It's pretty much descended at this point to a bunch of characters put on the screen who know they're gonna die. When everyone's in on the joke, what's the point of telling it?
A major letdown, Hatchet 3 still has some sparkle, but mostly it just fades.
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