Review #330: My Bloody Valentine (1981)

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #3 - My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Watch it here, on the Internet Archive!

I had never seen this movie before today, though I'd seen the 2009 remake at some point (not that I remembered much about it) and I couldn't even remember if that one was a remake, a sequel, or just something else using the same IP. 

My Bloody Valentine is the story about a group of twenty-somethings in a small mining town as they get ready for their first Valentine's Day Dance in twenty years. The mayor and sheriff are on edge, because last time they had a Valentine's Day Dance, it was the same night as a tragic mine accident that trapped six men. One of them- a man named Harry Warden- was eventually rescued, but not until after he had resorted to cannibalism. Since two of the supervisors left the mine that day to attend the dance (and presumably the accident wouldn't have happened otherwise), Warden went on a killing spree, murdering the two supervisors as well as anybody else who had taken part in the Valentine's Day Dance. And now, twenty years later, the town is putting on another dance- and it seems Harry Warden has returned to take his revenge once more.

While this wasn't a particularly exciting or novel film, it had a lot of charm. Many of the characters were genuinely likable and it was really a bummer to see some of them get killed. Much of the screentime revolves around a love triangle involving two of the miners and the girl they're fighting over, and I found myself going back and forth between which couple I thought was better for each other (though in retrospect maybe it would have been better for everyone if they all just went their separate ways). Not many other movies I've reviewed make me care about the characters like that; it really goes a long way to get and keep your audience invested in the story, and it's really a shame that so many filmmakers don't find it important enough to make sure that compelling characters are a part of the equation.

The story in this movie goes some interesting places, and there's a fun twist late in the movie that (although I did suspect it around the 3/4 mark) really added a layer of cleverness to the plot that would have been easy to overlook. The special effects were nice as well- apparently we were watching the restored Director's Cut version that brought back several minutes' worth of footage that had been cut due to the MPAA cracking down on violent films in 1981 (partly because of backlash from other violent movies, like Friday the 13th, but also because of John Lennon's death around that same time). But most of all, like I said before, there's just a certain charm this film has that you don't see much in more modern movies. The spaces seen in this small town all looked lived-in and characterized, and everyone in the film just seems so excited to be living their lives. The characters all felt like friends, and coworkers, and neighbors, and it was a lot of fun to see them on-screen having a good time.

Overall this was a fun film I would recommend, though hopefully there will be some better entries still as we go through the month.

Overall Rating: 8/10 Hot Dogs Boiling in a Pot

Location, Location, Location: According to director George Mihalka, they chose to shoot the mine sequences of the film at an actual defunct mine in Nova Scotia, because they found it to look rustic and authentic. When locals heard it was going to be used to film a movie, the community paid tens of thousands of dollars to have the mine cleaned and painted- but since that ruined the entire purpose of filming the movie there, the filmmakers had to spend $75,000 of the film's budget to restore the mine to the state it was in when they chose it in the first place!