My Bloody Valentine; Ballast

My Bloody Valentine (Patrick Lussier, 2009) [3-D] - B-

Never thought "charming" would be the best word to describe My Bloody Valentine 3-D, but here we are. Pretty much knew I would enjoy it when I saw the first shot: a blaring (and three-dimensional!) newspaper headline reading "BURIED ALIVE!" -- precisely the sort of silly grand gesture that makes me sit up and pay attention. What follows is an exuberant throwback to slasher flicks of old, set in a small mining town where everyone knows one another, with a goofy soap opera storyline stringing together the pickax impalements. Not remotely scary, ending is a not-terribly-clever cheat, and the 3-D doesn't really work (the background is flat and the foreground looms, which is the worst possible use of the technology; there's a scene where someone gets impaled through the head from the back, and it looks like the pole goes at a 45-degree angle), but I was willing to forgive all that for the sake of (for example) a scene where the female lead attacks the masked killer with frozen poultry.

Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2008) - B-

Went back and forth on the grade, but ultimately I think this is a bit affected, with Hammer's determination to disrupt conventional storytelling and screenwriting rhythms having the effect of making the characters (and the film) weirdly catatonic (and stupid: did those thugs pull over the woman and her son just to punch them in the face? I thought they'd at least take the car). It is otherwise an engaging, bleak, hopeful slice-of-life, three ordinary characters in a plausibly unremarkable situation, arriving at a simple, unobtrusive we-can-help-each-other message.