Teasing us to believe that we're in for yet another killer alligator flick, our opening scene introduces us to two cinematically stereotypical redneck types out on the bayou looking to do a little 'gator poaching when the son of the duo returned from a piss to find his father (Robert Englund in a mercifully short cameo) torn in half! Unable to utter any last words about NASCAR or Middle Eastern people, the son's final words are little more than gurgling screams as he's mauled and torn apart by a barely seen assailant. Without much time to process whatever the fuck it is we just saw, the movie jumps instead to Mardi Gras, where tits are on display so drunken frat boys can throw beads at them and that dickbag Joe Francis can make another 40 million dollars off of pathetic infantile drunk guys who order that shit for $10 a pop from 3am infomercials and 30 second ads on SpikeTV and Comedy Central instead of just getting it for free on the internet like the rest of us do.

Five standard issue college type guys are in New Orleans for, what else, Drunken Areola Fest 2007. Of the five there are only two that stand out: Ben, because he's all depressed over his girlfriend leaving him for a steroid case, and Marcus, because he's played by the guy who used to be Rudy's friend Kenny on "The Cosby Show", which means he gets the most lines out of the cast members with the best chance of dying at some point. The other guys are just there to fill up camera space for one brief scene, so I'm not going to bother learning their names. Anyway, being the one guy not interested in mammories drowned in alcohol and regurgitated Cajun food, Benji goes out looking for some geeky fun on some "haunted swamp tour" and Marcus drags himself along because he now feels guilty about loving boobs. It's very awkward listening to Kenny say "I'd rather skin my own dick"... So, the two seek out the Candyman himself, Tony Todd, to get a ride. Unfortunately the Harlequin painted Baron Samedi had a problem with a former patron slapping him with the curse of a voodoo lawsuit, so he redirects the lads to another tour around the block. Oh man, does this mean no more Tony Todd for the rest of the movie?! Damn it!

To fill out the body count a little, there are seven more people along for the tour: a guy making a cheap college skanks boob flick, his two "actresses", an obnoxious Midwestern tourist geezer couple, a mysterious and unfriendly chick for Ben to fall in love with, and the be-caped top hat wearing a-hole tour guide who Marco described as "Bruce Lee meets Uncle Remus". Of course they ignore the warnings of a urine guzzling beard-o to not go out into swamp after dark, unless they want to be chopped into gumbo meat by local urban legend hatchet murderer Victor Crowley. Of course their tour barge runs aground of a sizeable rock and in order to escape it sinking into the swamp and making them the late night "all you can eat" buffet for the local cold-blooded populace, our inadequate crew heads ashore amidst a torrential downpour. Of course Ben's enigmatic girlfriend not only has a gun but she also seems to know something about surviving in the bayou (probably FBI or a bounty hunter or on the run from an abusive spouse or something), so expect her to take charge. Meanwhile, old man tourist guy has part of his leg chewed off by a future pair of boots and nobody's cell phone works. As for Victor Crowley, he was your average inbred retard mutant child (probably a Voorhees relation) who died in a Halloween prank gone wrong thanks to an accidental face axing by his loving Pa (Kane Hodder!). Vic died and Pa Crowley later died of grief, but local legends say that Vic wanders this very neck of the swamp crying and looking for his daddy. Either way, our little crew just happens to be nearby the burnt out remains of the Crowley home, so it looks like they'll be holding up there till the storm blows over... or until sunrise... or until they can figure out it's the owner of the haunted amusement park trying to scare away the locals so he can drill for oil in the swamp unabated... or something.

As you can guess, the big retarded Neanderthal in cover-alls is indeed on the warpath, chopping up his victims with a hatchet and tearing them to pieces with his hulking inbred super strength!... and looking like Jason circa his slow-motion close-up in Friday the 13th Part 2... Now we just have to wait for everybody to die and let the special effects crew make this trip worth the price of admission... which they do... repeatedly! Gore whores, this is your stop on the 3:15 bus to Violence Villa. Crazy Vic uses everything from his title lumberjacking tool to a shovel to a cordless belt sander (I guess her still gets electrical service out at his burned out shack?) to trim down the numbers while Ben and his girlfriend try to figure out a way to put Crowley down for the ten count, whether by gun, pitchfork, flammable liquid or some other method to keep him from surviving for a sequel before he can kill them all off first. And you know that even if they think they've killed him, there's no way he's really dead... unless the movie does so badly in the DVD market that no one's willing to touch a script for the sequel with a ten-foot stabbin' pole, in which case Big V might as well be encased in concrete and dropped off the next Rosie O’Donnell gay exclusive cruise ship heading out to sea.

Well, that's over with. Now what? All in all, Hatchet is a modern day attempt at recapturing the simplified carnage and magic of the early Friday the 13th movies. Back in the days when Jason was just a deranged gorilla decked out in modified potato sack and tearing through unsuspecting teens like a scythe through shafts of wheat, falling off of chairs and bisecting shitheads doing handstands. But, the differences between Jason's early exploits and those of Vic Crowley are as follows: (1) Even if you take out the entirety of what was established in Friday the 13th, in F13 2 we're still introduced to our main man throughout the movie with little segments here and there as he and the cast build his legend up with stories and the occasional graphic death. Hatchet spends too much time on getting Ben and the rest out into the swamp and not enough time building up Crowley for us. Instead he's given a slapdash origin before he's thrown into our face and we're just kinda left to run with the carnage. Don't get me wrong, I like carnage, but they just did it better 25 years ago. (2) The ending is such a Friday the 13th ending that it's almost funny, only it's done like some kind of "extreme sports" rendition... I don't know, you'd have to see it to understand what I'm getting at. There's no doubt the whole project's a labor of love for bygone slashers of the eternal '80s, so not only do you need to be a fan of those flicks to dig the experience, but you need to be okay with these so-called "tribute flicks" too.

If you need more story and something with a new flavor you haven't slapped on your tongue a thousand times before, you're humping the wrong leg here. Naturally the movie couldn't live up to the hype surrounding it (I really wish I hadn't seen that damn magazine ad...), but in and of itself it's a fairly decent way to wreck a couple hours. The dialogue will either make you laugh, annoy the crap out of you, or start off doing one and then switch to the other. The acting is nothing special and the story is obviously generic, but it's fun to try and pick out all the little nods to other old school horror flicks. Most importantly with this kind of movie though is the gore, which is excessively graphic and plays to the fans of the red stuff, doing so with good old fashioned special effects and not just some cheap-ass computer graphics program. So, if you just need a little bit of bloodshed to hold you close and whisper sweet nothings into your ear till the sun rises, Hatchet'll do pig, Hatchet'll do...