My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Two miners go into a mine, one of them takes off her miner suit (surprise! she's a lady) and gets ready to get intimate with her coworker but he sees a heart tattoo on her chest, flies into a rage and kills her! Happy Valentine's Day!

Some time later, a bunch of manly men come back from the mine and are doing various manly things in a bar: playing that game where you put your hand on a table and stab the spaces between your fingers with a knife as fast as you can, drinking beer, sexually harassing waitresses, and planning Valentine's Day dances! The old bartender warns them not to, as there is a crazy miner that really hates Valentine's Day dances- or anything resembling a dance, like a party or a hoedown or a get-together- and if you have one, he is just gonna kill you. All the miners laugh off his advice and drink more beer and let's PAR-TAY!

Why does the miner hate Valentine's Day dances so much? Well, there was a dance and his supervisors left him and his crew out in the mines and there was an explosion and everyone died, except this miner!

This is probably the worst setup for a slasher movie ever. I mean, Jason was left to drown by uncaring camp counselors. Freddy was burned to death. The guy in the Burning... was also burned, but only really badly and not to death. The miner should probably be thankful really. He wasn't even hideously burned!

But you know, this is slasher and it's a really good one, so that is all the setup you really need. All the miners and their women seem to be in their late 20s at the very least, though that doesn't stop the sheriff from referring to them as "bunch of kids" a few times. The main character is extremely obnoxious- he apparently just left one day to try to make it out in the city or whatever and failed miserably and now is back doing backbreaking mine work and just expects the girl he abandoned to come back to him, regardless of the fact that she has moved on to some other manly guy. So the first guy spends most of the movie sulking and finally starts a fight with the new boyfriend and gets totally wrecked, which was surprising and awesome.

There are two things that separate this from any other slasher from the early 80s. First, it is extremely brutal! I got to watch the uncut version and I was a little shocked. There is even some totally out of nowhere and unlikely Italian exploitation eyeball violence! Second, the small mining town setting is really interesting. The last part of the movie was shot in an actual mine and it's a really great location for a slasher movie final chase.

Overall a really great horror flick and well worth seeing if you've seen all the Friday the 13th movies and are looking for something around the same time, but really violent and from Canada.