Reviews of Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet

This website was created to promote the gory, slasher movie, Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet which was released in 2009. The images/ graphics on the site were great. I have included some of them them placed between the reviews. To engage visitors and generate buzz for the film the site had a Blood Night Hunt Contest. Prizes included:

One (1) Grand Prize: $10,000 Cash. Prize will be awarded by company check made payable to the winner.
Five (5) Second Prizes: Apple® iPod™. iPod to be loaded with early screeners of the movie. Approximate retail value $200 each.
Ten (10) Third Prizes: A Prop from the movie. Each prop will be selected by the Sponsor in its sole discretion. Approximate retail value $100.

After the movie's promotional machine ceased, BloodNightMovie.com's usefulness was over. Its domain registration eventually expired and the site disappeared from the web. Recently discovered BloodNightMovie.com's domain was available. I bought it with the goal of recreating the site from its archived pages. Unfortunately there was little content so instead I listed reviews and images of the movie, and you, the visitor, can decide if you want to watch Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet on Netflix.

Alas, the movie itself did not go over well with audiences when it was first released, garnering only an 18% on the RottenTomatometer. Nevertheless, as the years went by, horror film viewers discovered Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet. As a teenager, I thought the movie was a hoot. Just putting up the reviews and images brought back a lot of vivid memories of being a teenager and doing incredibly stupid stuff. Some might say I have grown out of that stupid stuff now that I work for a progressive tech firm where I am part of a Salesforce CRM development team. We build custom applications, as well as responsive Salesforce employee-facing mobile enterprise apps on Force.com for our clients. We are able to support every aspect of the software and product development life cycle of Salesforce. On any given day my team moves from feasibility analysis, to user experience design and prototyping, to working on the development of scalable, winning solutions. I regularly work with such front-end technologies such as JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, ExtJS, Ajax, as well as software languages: Java, Grails, Groovy, and PHP. Obviously I have a solid understanding of both the Salesforce.com and Force.com platforms. Gee, I sound like a pretty tech savvy guy. But there is still some of that teenage craziness remaining and as soon as I told my team members what I was planning to do with this domain, we all got together and had a Blood Night movie bash. We had a bloody good time! (Sorry about that.)

+++

+++

 

Reviews from Rotten Tomato

Posted 2009

A shocking Long Island legend returns with a blood vengeance in this independent chiller starring Bill Moseley and Danielle Harris (Rob Zombie's Halloween). Back in 1978, little Mary Mattock shocked her small community when she viciously murdered her entire family with a hatchet. A decade later Mary staged a daring escape from the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, only to be gunned down by the police outside of the sanitarium walls. Ever since that fateful night, the date of Mary's demise has been known as Blood Night by the Long Island locals. It's a frivolous excuse for restless teens to party like there's no tomorrow. And this year, there might not be. When a group of mischievous teens begin falling prey to what appears to be Mary Mattock's vengeful spirit, panic starts to spread, and the horrifying truth about the murderess' grim legend finally comes to light.

Rating: R (for pervasive strong bloody horror violence, sexual content, nudity, language and teen partying)
Genre: Drama, Horror, Mystery & Suspense
Directed By: Frank Sabatella
Written By: Elke Blasi, Frank Sabatella
In Theaters: Dec 1, 2008 Wide
On DVD:Jun 14, 2011
Runtime:1 hr. 24 min.

TomatoMeter: No critic reviews Audience Rating 18%

Dean King
** ½
A decent little modern slasher film. It has plenty of gore and a few grisly kills. It has a strong start but it felt rushed towards the last 15mins which was a bit of a let down. It's very short at just 80mins in total. Good for a short fix for Slasher fans but we still want better than this.

A.D. Villarreal
***
I only watched this for two reasons: gory deaths and Danielle Harris. It delivers on both counts, period.*
*Pun intended

Brian De Guelle

There's some gore, some giggles and a whole lot of gratuitous nudity, which I can appreciate, but these aren't enough things to make a movie *good*.

+++

+++

BLOOD NIGHT Update!

Article from FRIGHT posted in 2008 (iconsoffright.com)

Several months ago, we posted a teaser trailer for an upcoming horror movie titled BLOOD NIGHT: THE LEGEND OF MARY HATCHET, which stars genre vets Danielle Harris (HALLOWEEN) and Bill Moseley (THE DEVIL'S REJECTS). We caught up with director Frank Sabatella at this past weekend's FANGORIA convention in Secaucus, NJ to get a status update on the project. "We just finished the 2nd rough cut and we just sent it over to audio," Sabatella tells ICONS, "so we're currently doing a little bit of sound design and cleaning up all the dialogue, then we’re going into a pretty solid polishing phase while the film is scored."

When asked how the editing process has been going, Sabatella couldn't be happier. "It’s definitely on track. It has the feel I wanted, which is being a classic slasher movie but modernized. To me, I think it portrays that exactly. The story is there, the gore is there and it’s looking really good."

Speaking of gore, BLOOD NIGHT's FX artist Jeremy B. Selenfriend is also at the table, and with plenty of left over goodies from the film's murder sequences! (See photos below) "The movie's got 26 on-screen kills," gushes Selenfriend. "I’ve known Frank for a lot of years now and a lot of it, Frank gave me the starting point and asked ‘What are your ideas? What can you do to make this more then just another death scene?’ So, some of them we got to go really, really elaborate and neat, and some of them he wrote that way to begin with. I don’t often get to put in my ideas, so this was nice. Frank and I know each other well enough that he trusted me to come up with some cool things."

As far as an official release, Sabatella tells us, "We have a pretty healthy list of distributors asking us for a final cut, so right now we’re focusing on making the (final) cut as amazing as we can. We also definitely plan on getting it out to festivals. I want to see how the audience reacts. That’s the point, right? We want to see the audience’s reactions, so the quickest & best way to do that is find a good festival, get it in there and screen it – I can’t wait to watch this with an audience and see how they react. Hopefully they like it!"

So, with the introduction of the iconic "Mary Hatchet" character, did the director set up BLOOD NIGHT to have a potential sequel? "Well, it’s a funny question because when I wrote the script, I said I will absolutely not do a sequel. I wanted it to have a definitive end. But as I’m putting it together, more and more people are asking about it. I’ve thought about it and I think if the interest was there and somebody wanted to do a sequel, I would, but I’d take the story elements in a very different direction. The character of Mary Hatchet herself is so cool that there’s so much that can be done with it. Now after having seen this movie, through the editing, although I’m very happy with it, you sometimes think ‘Man I wish I did this!’ or ‘I could’ve done this.’ So, potentially there could be another BLOOD NIGHT. There definitely could be

+++

+++

Tales From the Batcave Review

Posted: Monday, March 11, 2013

Blood Night is the name a small town has given to the day that an escaped mental patient who committed several murders, Mary Hatchet, was caught and killed. Turns out as a child, one stormy night Mary just up and murdered her parents with scissors, which is what landed her in the mental institution. Fast forward to her in her twenties, and she gets a visit from an overweight, creepy orderly who's feeling all rapey. Mary is told that the baby dies during birth, and then snaps and goes on a murder spree.

So that's the backstory we're given on the title character. The movie then shifts to present day, and a bunch of high school kids are planning their Blood Night shenanigans. There are lots of "Halloween-centric" goings on including: Ouija boards by Mary's grave, toilet papering houses, egging people, etc. Since they're teenagers, there's also drinking and pre-martial sex aplenty. Eventually, the kids start getting killed off in fairly brutal fashion. It appears that Mary Hatchet has returned to do a little Blood Night celebrating of her own.

Here's the thing about Blood Night, I'm not sure if the people responsible for it were attempting to create an homage to 80's slashers, but that's exactly what they ended up with. It's predictable to the point that I'm willing to say that if you don't figure out what's going on the second Danielle Harris appears on screen, then you've probably never watched a movie before. The kills are all pretty gory, and the effects were mostly practical. Make-up is good, copious amounts of blood, heads being split open, all that kind of fun stuff. There's plenty of nudity, an entire house full of clichéd characters, and the town apparently only has one or two adults, one of whom is the alcoholic Vietnam war vet, who works as a caretaker in the cemetery, played by Bill Moseley. So see? It's an 80's movie, only it was made now.

+++

+++

Review from Horrorphilia

 

Reviewer: Chuck Conry
The Rating (8/10)
Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet
The Prologue
In a day and time when a million horror films come out, it’s hard to find one that sticks out. And Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet, sticks out. Packing such horror names as Danielle Harris (who looks great) and Bill Moseley, who’s actually in a different role that we aren’t as use to seeing him play. But the style and what we get here overall is the stuff that you just never see anymore. It’s kinda like an 80s film with a whole new twist on it. I’m not saying it’s a perfect movie, it’s far from one. But it is a very entertaining film that can grab your attention and hold it.

The Movie
A group of teenagers celebrating Blood Night (one of which is Danielle Harris who is 30 but still looks great), the anniversary of the death of a local axe murderer, Mary Hatchet, suddenly find themselves face to face with the realities of her haunting. As they run from the bloody rampage left behind they’ll need to survive the night to expose the truth behind the legend of the infamous Mary Hatchet.

One thing you will notice right from the start of this thing is the gore. There is a bit of a return to form for horror here, with a lot of natural stuff going on. As we finally find a newer film that goes back to the horror roots in more than one way. More natural gore and a cast of youngsters that we hate very badly and want to see die as soon and as graphically as possible. And I am soo happy to report to you that that is just what we get for the most part with this one. And a whole lot of T and A is here as well. I mean heck, even Mary Hatchet herself spends most the film in the nude. It gave me 80s flashbacks and that’s a good thing.

So along with all our foulmouthed and annoying teen characters (one of which I remember from As The World Turns, but don’t tell anyone I know that), we got Danielle Harris and Bill Moseley. They aren’t here a whole lot, but they are here to be sort of an anchor of familiarity to the audience. Plus, they are very good actors so we love to see them. Even if people refuse to cast Danielle as a 30 year old woman in movies. Now don’t get me wrong, she’s hot and looks awesome, but she’s not a teen anymore. So can we get her in a role that fits her age. please? I also feel I should note that while I say the cast of characters are annoying, I don’t mean they are bad. They are good actors to pull that unlikeable stuff off. You can tell that’s what they are trying to do, and it works.

The movie kicks off in awesome fashion. It does slow down a bit after that, but the blood comes back into play as we go for the finish. But let me just make it clear that this one isn’t at all the most logical film I’ve ever seen, as a matter of fact the cast do some dumb stuff at times. But the movie is a damn enjoyable one. And it’s a very blood soaked one, which as you know, is my kinda movie. If you’ve yet to give this a try, I think you should. Some of the themes (like the fact it’s “Blood Night”) is done to death, but it’s got some very good things going for it.

The Conclusion
This one hit the DVD racks in 2011 and if you’ve yet to give a try, you should. We get some old school faces that all horror fans will enjoy seeing again. We also get some blood and clever dialogue in spots. So if you like movies that just show you a good bloody time, this would be one to check out.   

+++

+++

Review from FilmJunkieConfession

2013

I swear to your God that the writer and director of this film, Frank Sabatella, has one of the worst cases of Adult ADHD I have ever seen, and it shows. This film is all over the place. It’s like he started writing one horror film and then 20 minutes in decided to write a story to another horror film, and then 20 minutes after that he started writing the story to a different film! Not to mention this film helped me set a personal best record for watching a film. Normally I can guess the outcome to the plot of a film I’ve never seen before within 35-45 minutes, but for the film “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet” I shattered my old record. Shortly after the 8 minute mark I accurately guessed how the film was going to end! I hadn’t even been introduced to most of the main cast and within 8 minutes I predicted how this film was going to end. Looking back that should have been my signal to skip the film entirely, because I already knew how it was going to end. But you came to read a review of an awful horror film, and I’m going to deliver.

So “Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet” is a 2009 Horror film that—like I said—is kind of all over the place. It starts off in Long Island, New York in 1978, and a young girl named Mary “Hatchet” Mattock butchers her parents to death.  Why does Mary murder her parents? I don’t know, Frank Sabatella forgot to write in a motive, but that wasn’t going to stop him from carrying on with this crap fest of a film. Actually to be fair, they briefly touch upon it in the opening credits that she has some condition that causes her to “Menstruate” excessively (Eeeeeeeeewwwwwwww!) and that somehow contributes to some massive psychological defect that causes her to become a mute homicidal maniac.

The film flashes forward to nine years later, and Mary’s now a young woman and is locked up in a room in a mental asylum...naked? Why does the hospital let her sit around naked all day? She wasn’t naked when they found her earlier in the film so why do they let her sit around her room naked all day long?  Any way’s I’m getting away from the plot, but I do have a valid point to make about this later. So one night a security guard spots Mary sitting naked in her room and decides to go in and rape her. Mary gets pregnant as a result of the rape, and all the Doctors in the hospital are outraged, but decide it’s in everyone’s best interest to not have the child aborted or have the guard fired and arrested (FYI, whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, keep your personal feelings about abortion OUT OF THE COMMENT SECTION!). So Mary has her baby, but it “dies”. So Mary becomes very upset and somehow manages to break out of her room and murder everyone who works in the Hospital. How is that even possible? For one thing, how did she break out of her room without making any noise or anyone noticing? Second of all are you really trying to convince me that one woman in her early 20’s could not be stopped or slowed down and managed to kill every single employee of a mental hospital? Yeah, I’m not buying it! So Mary wanders out of the Hospital and is found by two cops wandering around the property naked with a severed head. So despite not having any lethal weapons the police decide to open fire and kill Mary after she tosses the head at their car and begins to scream. In the real world, both of those officers would be fired—or at least suspended—for using excessive force on an unarmed perpetrator.

The film flashes forward to nine years later, and Mary’s now a young woman and is locked up in a room in a mental asylum...naked? Why does the hospital let her sit around naked all day? She wasn’t naked when they found her earlier in the film so why do they let her sit around her room naked all day long? Any way’s I’m getting away from the plot, but I do have a valid point to make about this later. So one night a security guard spots Mary sitting naked in her room and decides to go in and rape her. Mary gets pregnant as a result of the rape, and all the Doctors in the hospital are outraged, but decide it’s in everyone’s best interest to not have the child aborted or have the guard fired and arrested (FYI, whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life, keep your personal feelings about abortion OUT OF THE COMMENT SECTION!). So Mary has her baby, but it “dies”. So Mary becomes very upset and somehow manages to break out of her room and murder everyone who works in the Hospital. How is that even possible? For one thing, how did she break out of her room without making any noise or anyone noticing?  Second of all are you really trying to convince me that one woman in her early 20’s could not be stopped or slowed down and managed to kill every single employee of a mental hospital? Yeah, I’m not buying it! So Mary wanders out of the Hospital and is found by two cops wandering around the property naked with a severed head. So despite not having any lethal weapons the police decide to open fire and kill Mary after she tosses the head at their car and begins to scream. In the real world, both of those officers would be fired—or at least suspended for using excessive force on an unarmed perpetrator.

So our main characters, and I call them characters instead of heroes because heroes is a term that implies that we actually like them, go to the cemetery where Mary is buried and try to contact the spirit of Mary Hatchet using a Ouija board (freaking cliché enough for you?!).  While in the cemetery they are spotted by the cemeteries loveable drunken caretaker “Graveyard Gus”, played by B-Horror Movie Legend Bill Moseley.  Gus tells the kids (and the films audience) the third different Legend of Mary Hatchet story in the film. The kids leave Gus, and head back to the house for an alcohol fueled orgy, and that’s pretty much the next thirty minutes of the film.  You know for a film called “Blood Night”, there’s certainly not a lot of blood being shown. There’s more hardcore nudity and sex scenes then murders scenes at this point in the film, and all I could think of during this part is I’m so bored, and can’t wait for people to start dying. Oh another thing that this film does is make a big deal about how excited the kids are to watch “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” at the house.  I know there’s a taboo in film where you’re not supposed to reference better films in your own film, and it’s pretty sad that referencing a film as bad as “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” is implying that “Killer Tomatoes” is more credible then your film.

At the party a new girl named Alissa has moved back to Long Island from Chicago. She’s played by actress Danielle Harris, and is clearly the long lost daughter of Mary Hatchet who has returned to kill all the teens. All right, I’m done wasting time talking about this films lack of plot, I’m speeding through. So kids at the party start turning up dead, they think it’s the ghost of Mary Hatchet; it turns out its Alissa who is Mary’s long lost daughter. She kills them all with a pick axe and scissors. The End!

Santa Maria this movie is bad! And the reason why it’s so bad is that it has a story that’s all over the place. It’s like three horror film plots trying to combine into one, not to mention has a lot of things that don’t make sense.How does menstruating an excessive amount of blood (eeeeewwwwwwww!) turn you into a psychotic murder? And seriously what’s with the unnecessary nudity? Even Mary’s ghost is seen wandering around naked, why is that? Did the undertaker’s really think something like “Well no one’s coming to her funeral so why don’t we just not even bother to put a dress on her and bury her as is?”. Or maybe it was contractual nudity stating that actress Samantha Siong had to appear nude for the part in the film, or you know maybe Frank Sabatella is just a pervert and wanted to exploit a pretty young woman on screen. Don’t waste any time of this film, it’s a film so bad that not even Bill Moseley and Danille Harris could save it. It’s Just Sucks.
BloodNightMovie.com