Bloody Brilliant

I have no plans to see the remake of My Bloody Valentine, for a few reasons.

First, I'm not big on "dead teenager" movies. I have a few in my DVD collection--classics like the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, plus some retina-scarring bad ones like Cheerleader Camp (my longstanding crush on Betsy Russell overruled my common sense on that one)--but I've ignored the overwhelming majority of entries in the subgenre; you'll find no copies of Friday the 13th lying around La Casa del Terror.

Second, as little use as I have for dead-teenager movies, I have even less use for remakes of dead-teenager movies. And there have been a lot of them in the past few years: Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Black Christmas, When a Stranger Calls and The Hills Have Eyes have all been done, with retreads of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Last House on the Left on the way. (There have been so many, in fact, that I'm sure I've forgotten a few.)

Lastly, as noted here previously, Valentine's Day and I don't exactly get along, so going to see a Valentine-themed mad-slasher movie qualifies as the worst of both worlds for me.

However, I have to give credit where it's due: The marketing campaign for the new Bloody is pretty sweet (in a sick, demented way, of course).

The posters, which have been popping up on CTA platforms and abandoned buildings for weeks, feature, as the original movie did, someone dressed as a miner who's found a new use for his pickaxe--i.e., driving it into someone's skull (and since the remake is in 3D, it looks like he's driving it into your skull). This week, though, one of my co-workers brought me two other bits of advertising for the movie: A 3D version of the poster (known in the intersecting circles of printing and advertising as a lenticular) and a pickaxe-shaped keychain that also doubles as a bottle opener.

The lenticular is cool to look at--as you walk past it, the pickaxe comes RIGHT OUT AT YOU--and the keychain/bottle opener is made of sturdy cast aluminum, so it might find its way into my pocket on a more permanent basis. Plus? If I ever get trapped in a mine cave-in (with or without a crazed killer hunting me down), I could use the mini-pickaxe to dig my way out--except it might take, like, two years to do it.