I saw this movie years ago, but I feel like I didn't give it the attention it deserved. It was one of those 80s slasher movies I'd wanted to see for years, but when I finally got to see it, I didn't get the hype. I usually love slashers though, so I wanted to watch it again and see if it was better than I remembered. Hope spring eternal during the horror challenge!
So this movie opens with a sexy scene down underground in a mine that turns into a bloody tragedy (who walks around into a dirty mine almost naked to have sex? Gross). Anyway, as the story goes, there's going to be a big valentine's dance in town, so the supervisors of the mine leave early and just abandon all the workers still down in the mine, and when something goes wrong, the town just keeps on having their party while a bunch of workers in the mine are buried alive (rude). Later, when a survivor is found in the rubble, he's obviously pissed off, so he exacts a bloody revenge and warns the people of the town to never hold another valentine's dance again, or they will all die horribly. Of course, after 20 years pass, the story becomes more of a legend, and people decide to hold another valentine's dance again, but unfortunately, someone seems to want to make the bloody death threats a terrifying reality. As the bodies pile up, the townspeople have to figure out who's doing the killings and stop the killer before it's too late.
I have to say, if a bunch of people held a dance while I was buried in a mine suffering, I'd be really pissed too and I would probably want revenge. I'm not saying I would kill a bunch of people, but I definitely understand why the killer was angry, and I don't think I'd want to hold a big celebratory dance on the anniversary of such a tragedy, even if it was 20 years later. That just seems in really poor taste to me, so I have way more sympathy for the killer than the jerks in town. Not many of the characters are very likeable. There are two guys fighting over the love of one girl, some town officials who want to move on with the dance and pretend that the past tragedy never happened, some local cops who can't track down the crazed killer from years ago so they scramble around instead of doing anything to protect people from the swiftly mounting death toll.
I really don't get why they try to keep the new murders a secret for so long. Don't you think you should warn people about something like that? Not very sympathetic folks here, is what I'm saying, so I didn't really mind seeing them get stalked and killed. Plus it doesn't seem like they put many safety precautions into place in the mine, even after a bunch of people died, so if I were a mine worker I'd be afraid for my life even if there wasn't a killer on the loose. And I don't know what crack the townspeople are smoking, but holding a big party inside the actual mine sounds like a terrible and dangerous idea, so I have a hard time believing people would be stupid enough to do it (and how in hell does everyone in town know about it except the cops? How stupid are these people...wait, don't answer that). I guess if the characters in these movies were smart, the movie would be five minutes long, so we have to suspend our disbelief a bit.
I think the problem I had with this movie the first time I watched it was that I hated all the characters, so I didn't really care what happened to them, and the whole plot was so cruel and heartless that I kinda wanted to climb into the movie and kill everyone myself, and it took way too long for everyone to die, so I just sat these getting more annoyed by the minute. Movies like this work better if there's at least one person I can root for who isn't a homocidal maniac. I guess I enjoyed it more this time around, but I actually think I might like the remake better. At least that movie had some halfway decent people I didn't want to see dead.
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