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 alentine is another in a long line
of movies about "hip" teens/20-somethings being "haunted by their
past." It's been done to death in recent years, starting with the God-awful
I Know What You Did Last Summer and it's obscene sequel and ilk. I
usually know what I'm going to get, and I usually know the villain will act dead
at the end, but won't be truly dead, since he needs to return for a sequel. I
know the "nice" girl will survive, and the nice girl is always
apparent at the very beginning by being "nice" in everything she does,
as opposed to the "not so nice" folks around her.
I know the
"bitchy" and "slutty" girls will go out in bloody kill
scenes. I know the "bullies" and the "asshole" guys will
also get their comeuppance. I know the cops will be ineffective and have the
investigative mentality of retarded children. I know all this going in, but was
proven wrong with Jeepers Creepers. I had hoped Valentine would
prove me wrong again. Alas, it did not.
Valentine begins with a Junior High School dance for
6th graders where a nerdy looking kid with glasses is going around
the gym asking girls to dance. They all say no, until a bored, slightly
overweight girl agrees. The two end up kissing under the bleachers and upon
being discovered by a group of boys, the girl tells them the boy is attacking
her. It's her attempt to convince them she's "above" voluntarily
kissing the nerdy boy. They attack him and he's sentenced to reform school for
his "crimes."
Fast forward 13 years, and all the girls who had said no
to the nerd, including the overweight girl, are now in their '20s and still
close friends. One of those friends meets an untimely death in a medical school
morgue at the hands of a masked killer wielding a large knife. This brings the
rest of the friends back together, and so begins our slasher film, as the
friends and the bumbling cop tries to figure out who the killer is before he
finishes them off.
What's most interesting about Valentine is that its
attempts to hide, and at the same time give us clues, as to the identity of the
killer is so pathetic. It doesn't help that the person who most looks like the
killer is played by an actor who most looks like a killer! (You'll understand
when you see the film.) The clues are so in-your-face and obvious that it's
impossible to ignore them, read them, and conclude the killer's identity from
them. Red herrings are thrown in for good measure, but they're pretty much
ineffective, since anyone with half a brain can figure out who the killer is
barely 20 minutes into the movie.
And if you can't figure it out, then I suppose
these kinds of movies were made for you -- the dumb teenage crowd with just
enough brain cells to buy your movie ticket and your popcorn at the concession
stands. Without a decent mystery, the movie then has to rely on gruesome kill
scenes and what passes for characterization. Unfortunately, as many slasher film
fanatics know, characterization has no place in slasher films. So with that out
of the way, what's left? The killings, of course.
Valentine's death scenes are not as gruesome as one
would expect in a slasher film. Although one notable exception is when a victim
has her face shoved into a group of broken glass. Another problem with Valentine
is that we follow the 4 friends throughout the movie, but the majority of the
killings before the slaughter at the end involves minor, peripheral characters
that have little impact to the story. (Actually, it's really hard to explain why
the killer even bothers to kill them, anyway, since they have nothing to do with
him or his vendetta against the friends).
What about the characters, you ask? Oh, well, let's see,
there's the slutty one (Denise Richards); the homely one (Marley Shelton); the
formerly-overweight but now slightly spoiled brat (Jessica Capshaw); and the
fourth girl (Jessica Cauffiel) who is spared the filmmaker's attempts to
"round her character" because she bites the bullet early in the film.
In fact, until the slaughter at the end, which can boast half a dozen corpse to
its name, the film is relatively bloodless, and even a tad boring. Fortunately,
the filmmakers realize they really have little to work with, and the movie, just
slightly under 90 minutes, moves at a quick pace. It also helps that of the four
friends, we are with Denise Richards and Marley Shelton the most, and both women
are easy on the eyes. Both women wears skimpy clothes and has more than one
shower scenes each. How nice, thank you.
One of the foundations of slasher films is its
implausibility. In Valentine you have the presence (or should I say, lack
of presence) of logic. One of the four friends is killed off early in the movie
at a social gathering, falls down some stairs, and lands in a garbage dumpster
at the lobby of the building. Her body apparently goes unnoticed for days,
because neither the cops nor the friends realize what happens to her until days
later. Another character is axed to death in a basement and his body is left
there to rot, but nobody discovers it -- ever.
And like all slasher
monsters/killers, the killer in Valentine seems to possess not only
superhuman endurance, but also superhuman speed and agility, since he seems to
be able to appear and disappear at will. The filmmakers use the tried and true
slasher technique where a character is attracted to a noise behind her, looks
behind her, sees no one, and when she looks forward again, either the killer is
there or something that wasn't there before is now there. I guess you could say
every killer in slasher movies has the ability of a super ninja. Also in the
last scene, a house full of servants and partygoers suddenly empties out to
allow the last survivor and the killer to face off. It's completely ridiculous
but necessary in slasher films for the entire world to disappear at different
intervals.
Valentine is not a bad film, but it is incredibly
predictable. I might have enjoyed the film more if I didn't know what was going
to happen every minute of it, or who was going to die and who was going to
survive. Jeepers Creepers
convinced me that the slasher film had
potential, but Valentine convinces me that it doesn't. What to believe?
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