I have to admit, when I saw the new version of My Bloody Valentine, shot for a 3-D process that I had hoped was long dead, I was surprised.

When I first heard about the resurgence of 3-D as a medium I shook my head and sorrowed for the industry.  I really did–this was an idea that made me cringe to the bottom of my very soul.  I knew Hollywood was desperate–explains Marley and Me; a movie that’s basically an hour and a half of cute dog is a sure sign of capitulation to sheer desperate hope–but I hadn’t thought that things were so bad that they had to resort to the bad old days of cheesy glasses to get the proverbial butts in the equally proverbial seats?  Scuse me for my skepticism.

And how did it turn out, you ask?  Well, better than you think.  But first, a word on the plot.  A young man has returned to his small, close-knit mining community to settle some long-dormant business on the tenth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day killings in said small town.  Of course, sudden homecomings like this never come without controversy, and in this case, don’t come without a whole slew of murders.  But who’s killing the people of this small town?  Is it the miner who ran amok in the first place?

Or is it someone ELSE?

You can tell almost immediately from just reading this portion that this movie will be packed to the gills with red herrings.  Indeed, the way the movie is set up it will be pretty much impossible to tell EXACTLY who the killer is until said killer is revealed at the end.  I’m not even going to spoiler by using a GENDER term, it’s that clouded.

This leads me into a discussion of the 3-D concept.  I had not thought, before seeing this, that 3-D could be anything short of a gimmick, a last-ditch effort to boost sagging sales in the face of an economic firestorm the likes of which those of us under the age of sixty have never seen.  I had sorrowed to the thought of having to borrow–or worse, rent or BUY–a pair of ridiculous glasses that would not fit over my own.  I had cringed at the thought of seeing the movie in a theatre not outfitted for 3-D and having to suffer through a moulange of red and blue images.

But no.  What I saw that day was a surprising improvement over regular filmmaking.  Even without 3-D augmentations, without 3-D glasses, the scenes that were clearly designed to be viewed in 3-D (things flying directly at the audience, tree branches, pickaxes like you saw in the commercial) still managed to fly at me in a forced-perspective sort of affair.  I was amazed–I was actually watching a movie with 3-D sequences WITHOUT the benefit of cheesy glasses.  There was no red / blue whatnot, nothing that was even out of the ordinary–just 3-D sequences…without glasses.

I approved, wholeheartedly.  By itself, My Bloody Valentine 3-D was a mundane, mediocre slasher title the like of which we’ve seen hundreds of times before.  But with that 3-D, it took on an added note of realism that improved the overall body of work with surprising effect.  What I had feared would be a simple gimmick had instead turned out to be spice enough to elevate the mundane into something at least slightly more interesting.

Considering that Hollywood’s order of the day is “more of the same and plenty of it”, it was a surprise to find a note of innovation in the theatre.  And that makes it worth a look.