Valentine (2001)

Valentine (2001)
Cast: David Boreanaz, Marley Shelton, Denise Richards, Jessica Capshaw
Director: Jamie Blanks
Synopsis: Wronged Geek returns from the dark past to exact revenge, again!

“should have gone for laughs” Empire

“shoddy” Total Film

“doesn’t deliver the goods” Time Out

As if to prove a point that things absolutely must go round in circles, along comes Valentine almost precisely 20 years after its mentor, the none-too-chilling My Bloody Valentine. Indeed the films share more than just carbon-copy title and theme; they both had shoestring budgets and feature an array of “aspiring” Barbie and Ken clones in the guise of actors (turns out these are Gap models undertaking the natural career move!).

The movie was shot in rapid time by Urban Legends director Jamie Blanks – 53 days to be precise whatever took them so long!?) The plot is vintage, dead-on-arrival, stale as mildewed socks, low-grade, low brow masked slasher (think Burning, Curtains, Prom Night, Terror Train, Friday the 13th’s Parts 3 – 9, Halloween’s part 4-6 etc., etc.) on the loose kind of mayhem. This time we have a 13-year-old nerdy-geeky-cretin asking the class babes for a dance on Valentine’s Day of all days. I mean, what was he thinking!? Finally, after copping a few catty salvos from the babe’s, he lands the class chubby, who is then busy slurping on his buck teeth when the horrid class bullies catch them. Chubb squeals claiming geek attacked her. Thus poor moron (Jeremy Melton) is sent to remand school for rotten eggs, where he becomes a Michael Myers wannabee. The audience is brought forward into the present. 13 years on from that fateful incident.

The bitchy girls have mutated into ghastly Barbie clones, each more frightening than the other. An equally alarming masked killer soon starts offing them, and anyone else comes in his/her murderous, blood-stained (drippy nosebleed!) way. The intro to the first death scene is easily the most substantial part of the film – Masked knife-wielding maniac stalks his victim in a room full of fresh corpses! One can be excused for believing that all the nasty reviews had been misguided, but only momentarily – it’s all downhill from the fifth minute.

The Major problem is that none of the characters evokes even the slightest speck of sympathy, in fact, more than that – each one is utterly loathsome, and you wish gruesome barbarism to be performed on them most horrendously as soon as possible! No such luck. The gore is strictly off-screen in the wake of Hollywood’s post-Columbine clean up act, so those aspirations of at least watching some mindless bloodletting are sadly dashed. Yet, as the rest of the movie is so utterly predictable, the death scenes, however tame, remain the best bits.

The killer has spent many hours copying the movements and mannerisms (almost shamelessly) of the peerless Michael Myers (from Haddonfield, Illinois) – the greatest of all masked marauders. He needn’t have bothered. The killer’s appearance is the only memorable aspect (thus the one-star rating) of an otherwise utterly dull affair – he looks impressive in his cherubic cupid mask and his tattered overcoat, nosebleed and all. And the prerequisite killer-twist in the tail is about as lame as they come. We later find out that the movie was green-lit by Warner’s when they found that TV hunk David Boreanaz of Buffy and Angel fame had signed on! – What a world! What a world! Truth be told, it is a bit of a guilty pleasure this one! that mask tips the scales in its favour and all is forgiven.

The scathing reviews were, after all, spot-on. The film is a painfully dull experience and an embarrassment to the (slasher) genre. Denise Richards, meanwhile, adds fuel to the theory that playing a Bond Girl is a career kiss-of-death?