'Bloody Valentine 3D' falls flat

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/movies/story/992661.html

It’s hard to pick the best visual effect in “My Bloody Valentine 3D.”

Maybe it’s when a guy catches a pickax in the back of the head and his skewered eyeball pops out of its socket and into the audience’s faces.

Or perhaps it’s the shrieking naked bimbo (actually she’s wearing a pair of high heels) who wobbles unsteadily across a parking lot in an inept attempt to get away from the villain, a relentless masked killer called the Miner. It’s more than just jiggle when it’s in 3-D.

Once viewed as a gimmick reserved for cheesy exploitation pictures, 3-D is back in vogue. This year a dozen 3-D movies will open on the nation’s screens … or at least those few screens equipped for digital projection and specially outfitted to take advantage of the Real D process for 3-D.

(Currently the Kansas City area has only four Real D auditoriums — Barrywoods, Eastglen, Town Center and Liberty — though that number will multiply when Dickinson Theatres completes its digital upgrade of the chain’s area megaplexes.)

There are dollars-and-cents reasons for exhibitors to jump on the 3-D bandwagon, because screens employing the process tend to sell three times the tickets of auditoriums showing the same movie in plain old 2-D, and they charge a couple of bucks more per ticket, too.

So far the new 3-D technology has been used mostly with computer-animated fare: “Beowulf,” “Bolt,” “Meet the Robinsons.” Last summer we saw “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” in which live actors moved through computer-generated 3-D environments.

Last weekend’s opening of “My Bloody Valentine 3D” was noteworthy in that this was a 100 percent live-action film.

Real sets. Real actors.

And, I think, some real problems.

I’m not going to discuss the dramatic qualities of “My Bloody Valentine 3D,” which is a just-passable remake of a 1981 slasher film. I will, however, apologize to anyone who went to see the film on the basis of the three-star wire service review The Star ran on opening day. The film wasn’t shown to local critics, and apparently only one national reviewer saw it in time to get a piece out on the wire, so that’s what we ran.

My rating: two stars.

From a technical standpoint, Real D is way superior to the old red-and-blue-lensed cardboard spectacles of yesteryear. No headaches because the left-eye and right-eye images aren’t properly synchronized. Less jarring when the film cuts from a long shot to a close-up and the focal length changes in the blink of an eye.

This is all to the good.

Unfortunately it means little if you can’t really see what’s happening.

My sense of “My Bloody Valentine” (I saw it at the AMC Town Center) is that it was maddeningly underlit. I realize a lot of the movie takes place in a dark coal mine, but even with scenes shot in bright daylight this movie looks dim.

It’s sort of like the effect you get at some drive-in theaters where the light thrown from the projector isn’t sufficient to fully illuminate the image on a screen 100 yards away.

I cannot say whether this is a filming problem or a projection problem.

Possibly the new 3-D cameras require so much illumination on the set that directors can only get the right exposure by cranking up the lights until they threaten to cook the actors alive. Or perhaps 3-D projection requires more lumens than the projectors can throw. Maybe there was something wrong with Town Center’s projector.

Perhaps “My Bloody Valentine” was a relatively cheap production that cut corners, and the problem won’t be repeated with big-budget efforts like James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi opus “Avatar.”

Whatever the cause, this hasn’t been an issue with the 3-D computer-animated films I’ve seen. They’ve been bright and shiny.

But if 3-D movies are ever to move beyond gimmickry to become part of the standard language of cinema, somebody’s going to have to do some tweaking.