Drink Moosehead Or Die: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Review

You could be forgiven for thinking that My Bloody Valentine is not actually an 80’s slasher movie but rather a feature length commercial for Moosehead. In case you’re some non beer drinking loser who doesn’t know what Moosehead is, it’s Canada’s most recognisable export lager.

All the drinkers in My Bloody Valentine drink Moosehead and those that don’t drink carry their crap around in used Moosehead cartons. Anyone who dares not drink Moosehead pays the ultimate price…
One little old lady never drinks Moosehead: she dies first
One idiot shoves Moosehead up his nose: he dies.
One girl sits around doin’ nothing while her boyfriend dutifully gets more Moosehead: she dies.
One couple of horny youngsters stop drinking Moosehead to shag: they die.
The prevailing message here is simple: drink Moosehead or die.

If you’ve not had Moosehead before you may well now be wondering what it’s like. To be perfectly honest, and at the risk of having a pick axe slammed into my skull and my heart torn out, it’s nothin’ special. Like most exported lagers it’s designed to appeal to a wide range of palettes and as a result it’s… well… kinda bland. Obviously, drinking Moosehead is preferable to dying (hell, drinking Tasman Bitter is preferable to dying), but it would never otherwise be my beer of choice. If you’re looking for a Canadian brew with some real flavour check out any one of the many oddly titled beers from French-Canadian brewer Unibroue.

But I digress.

The best thing I can say about My Bloody Valentine, is that it gives me an opportunity to talk about beer. Beyond that, it’s hard to recommend it. A lot of the violence was allegedly cut out for the benefit of US censors and no one has seen fit to restore it for the DVD release. So, in slasher movie terms, it is a pretty innocuous affair. A lot of the performances are distractingly hammy, even by 80’s standards. The comic relief guy, Howard (Alf Humphreys), is particularly annoying. He employs the Weekend At Bernies II philosophy of comedy that says you can make an unfunny script funny simply by acting like a complete twerp. The film’s conclusion is so arbitrary and makes so little sense any fun you had watching the melodramatic, Moosehead-swilling, caricatures being picked off one by one is soon forgotten.