Valentine (2001)

Valentine (2001) Directed by Jamie Blanks

An inane slasher like pretty much all the inane post-Scream slashers symptomatic of the meta-consciousness of Wes Craven’s opus. An unhinged, rancorous killer personifying the cupid of death not love breaks the hearts of young girls by slaughtering them one by one. Denise Richards, Marey Shelton, Jessica Capshaw, Jessica Cauffiel and Katherine Heigl embody the adolescent narcissism of postmodernism as they play the central girls whom the cupid-masked killer seeks to hit with an arrow, literally. The plot, unsurprisingly, uses the cliché of the weird kid bullied in school now seeking revenge as an adult against those who rejected and demeaned him.

On the one hand the script is mechanical, so mechanical that the characters seem automatons imitating the formula of nineties thrillers, and on the other hand, the redeemable filmmaking of Jamie Blanks revels in flirting with the hyper stylization of the visuals in the same vein of an absurdist giallo. These two facets never quite harmonize a smooth narrative, thus awkwardly exposing its rhetorical denouement, which is all too easy to decipher long before the film reveals it to us. The gimmicks are hacky and dysfunctional. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that its more extraneous portions – such as the detective randomly flirting Denise Richards – foster a raunchy but playful comedy. Somehow it manages to keep its meta character construction working by satirizing its milieu. When our exuberant female characters go to an exhibition of porn art, they mock the pseudo-artist who made it; a delightful irony considering they are characters from an admittedly smutty genre.

It’s a fun, ugly movie, the plot moves along briskly but in its narrative rapidity it always leaves traces of idiomatic clumsiness. In addition, the whole thing looks dull as hell – no surprise, since Rick Bota, the director behind some of the worst Hellraiser sequels, is the cinematographer here – a film lit with no expression or identity of its own, resulting in mismatched color schemes. I don’t know if the intention was to pull off a kitschy slasher, or just a slasher that looks boringly run-of-the-mill, but it still doesn’t do anything good for the imaginative, swirling, phenomenal vibrancy that Jamie Blanks’ camera’s visual patterns render in each of the grotesque murders. Let’s just say it’s passable entertainment as a holiday-themed slasher, however the film prefers to be treated more as a facsimile of better films, and in that spirit, it’s just downright terrible.