Victor Crowley (2017) Review: Adam Green Keeps Strong
“Return to his swamp”Synopsis: Ten years after the events of the original movie, Victor Crowley is mistakenly resurrected and proceeds to kill once more. | ![]() Watch now on Amazon |
Calamity Brains:
Victor Crowley picks up ten years after the murder spree of Hatchet, Hatchet II, and Hatchet III. After the events of the original trilogy, Crowley’s ghost has been relegated to legend status once more. Honey Island Swamp is now a tourist trap, and survivor Andrew (Parry Shen) has been living off the proceeds of his harrowing tale.
The morally repugnant practice of profiting off tragedy is well-represented in Victor Crowley: Andrew returns to Honey Island Swamp with a news team, determined to make just a little more money, while aspiring filmmaker Chloe (Katie Booth) brings friends to the island to shoot a proof of concept for her indie movie. Everything naturally goes quite wrong – the filmmakers accidentally resurrect Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder), the news team’s plane crashes, and everyone gets murdered. Usually, I find that lacking empathy for characters ruins some of the tension for me (because I feel they all sort of deserve what they get), but Adam Green‘s slashers are usually on the gory and fun side rather than the scary side for me, so it works.
Like the first three, Victor Crowley is mostly an extended exercise in coming up with bloody and creative kills. There’s a lot of snark and social commentary, and most of the characters are quite fun. (Being a pint-sized firecracker myself, I especially appreciated Laura Ortiz as Rose.) Nothing in the movie is meant to be taken very seriously, and the filmmakers are meta enough to make that clear.
Director/writer Adam Green deserves a lot of credit for the Hatchet series. Not only did he make a fun slasher independently, but he did it three more times, with surprisingly little variation in quality. Even with a low budget and brutal shooting process, he created a fun, gross, entertaining series.
If you liked the other Hatchet movies, you’ll like Victor Crowley. If you didn’t… well, we have very different taste in movies.
Calamity Brains’ Rating: B-
Watch now on Amazon
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