With recent horror movie franchises like the Scream movies coming to an end officially, you would have thought it was the end also of the latest reflux in popularity of the teen slasher genre. But apparently the Hollywood machinery refuses to see the genre die, believing that they can still cash in on the popularity of the WB Network’s many young stars by having them die endlessly in mediocre movies like Valentine.
Valentine does not set itself apart from the hundreds of similar movies released in the years following Scream that tried to reap the benefits of rehashing the same formula. It is decidedly unoriginal and bland, with a story that retreads all the old clichés we’ve seen time and again in these types of flicks. The movie opens with a scene set at a junior high dance thirteen years ago, where the stereotypical nerdy kid asks all the cute girls in school to dance with him but gets shot down again and again. Now that the girls are all grown up, they each start receiving Valentine’s Day gifts in the mail with horrid messages predicting their deaths, and soon afterwards the predictions come true, as the girls are murdered one by one.
With movies like Valentine, the only thing you can really judge it upon is the script. The directing techniques with such films are usual no-brainers, and with this movie’s director having also given us Urban Legends, I’m sure he was on autopilot. The acting similarly is nothing that can’t be done by hundreds of other young, up-and-coming actors, but of course audiences won’t go to see movies populated with no-names. So the producers hire popular pretty faces like David Boreanaz and Denise Richards to play lead roles, knowing people will flock to the theaters purely for the cheesecake (though in this film, despite its R rating, there is surprisingly none).
So the story itself can be our only basis for evaluation with a movie like Valentine, and really we don’t even have high hopes for that. As long as the death scenes are cool and the identity of the villain keeps us in suspense, we’re satisfied. But when we see in the opening credits that this movie had four screenwriters, we can’t be too hopeful, especially when we then quickly learn that these people were working together to adapt this monstrosity from a book by yet another author.
You’d think the sheer volume of people who touched this script before it went before the cameras would have led to at least a few moments of originality, but there again we are unfortunately disappointed. Valentine inundates us with plot points that go nowhere, like the lead investigator constantly flirting with Richards’ character Paige or the former alcoholism of Boreanaz’s character Adam. Scenes get wasted with subplots that never have a payoff, like one of the girls, Dorothy (played by Steven Spielberg’s stepdaughter Jessica Capshaw), having issues with the fact that she was overweight in junior high, or issues with her new stepmother being younger than she is, or issues with her new boyfriend Campbell’s supposed “Internet start-up” being a scam to steal her trust fund, or basically any attempts made to make her character more “fleshed out.” The stepmother is in one scene before she disappears, and Campbell seems to exist only as a red herring suspect (which we never believe) before he is killed by the real murderer. But why does his character get the axe (literally) if he doesn’t figure into the revenge motif? Other murders seem to take place simply because the person was in the wrong place at the wrong time, like when a really minor character Ruthie happens upon the killer dragging the corpse of the maid (the maid! an even more minor character!) up the stairs.
It also doesn’t help any that if you’ve seen even one of these types of teen slasher movies before, you can figure out who the killer is shortly after the first victim’s funeral. The writers threw in some red herrings, like Campbell or a guy who shares the same initials (JM) as the young nerd and who had a date with the first victim the night of her murder. But such false leads are so incredibly obvious that we never believe them; the only moment when we are even slightly willing to consider another suspect comes nearly at the end of the movie. But even then we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does, it comes as no surprise (though the final image of the film is a nice one, and I admire the director’s courage in letting things go slightly unresolved).
Slasher movies like these have other tricks that commonly pop up, like the fake scare when the music swells and we think the killer’s about to strike… but then it turns out to be a cat or the wind or, in one scene in this movie, a tree. So the character feels reassured that all is well, begins to back away from the tree without looking when BAM! the killer suddenly jumps out. Characters in movies like Valentine also never look to the sides when creeping down dark hallways, usually a character flaw that leads to their untimely demises. Such moments are so conventional that we anticipate them each time, and that brief moment of fright we might experience is so choreographed that we’re drained of the emotion long before it arrives.
We are left then with only one more avenue of evaluation, that of the interesting death scene, but even in this area, which is supposed to be the highlight of pictures like Valentine, the movie falls short. One character gets shot with a bow and arrow several times before we even have a chance to care, and another gets electrocuted in a hot tub. You can’t help but wonder why this movie got its aforementioned R rating when each of these death scenes is so tame and bloodless. Campbell getting an axe to the back leaves behind no mess whatsoever, and when another minor character gets beat to death with a hot iron, we see it moments later without a speck of blood on it. The first girl murdered, whose throat is slit in the opening of the film, produces only a slight trickle of blood and even that we only see secondhand when it runs off the table her body is lying upon. The only really gruesome death is given to the minor character mentioned earlier, Ruthie, whose face is impaled on the remnants of a broken glass door, but even that we don’t see on-screen, only later catching a split-second glimpse of the pool of blood she left behind. It seems that, had the director made a few more slight cuts, he could have gotten a PG-13 and reached a bigger audience, a youthful crowd that certainly is the target of those WB shows the cast is pulled from.
So with a villain that is obvious despite multiple attempts to get the audience looking in other directions, dead-end subplots, and unoriginal death scenes, the movie never rises above its slasher film roots. Even the self-aware sense of humor seen in recent films like Scream is lacking here; a comment about Boreanz’s character being “no angel” elicited groans from all five of us in the theater at the time. Fans of this genre will want to see Valentine, no doubt, but it definitely can wait until video. And even then I’d wait until it claimed its rightful space on the 99-cent, B-movie shelf at Hastings before checking it out; paying any more than that would simply be a waste.
