Thought i’ve run out of Valentine’s Day themed slasher to unearth?
Think again, because i feel i’m about to, but i managed to dig up one i’ve never heard before, not even in lists, simply called Valentine, released in 2001, based on the novel of the same name by Tom Savage.
1988, Valentine’s Day dance at a highschool in San Francisco, an outcast called Jeremy Melton asks out four girls for a dance, but he gets rejected. One of the girls friends’, Dorothy, accepts him, but when they make out under the bleachers, they are jumped by some bullies, and Dorothy accuses Jeremy of assaulting her, so they beat the shit out of him.
Jeremy is expelled, sent to reform school, then accused by the girls of sexual assault, and eventually is sent to a sanitarium.
13 years later, the same girls are stalked and killed by someone in a trenchcoat sporting a Cupid mask, all in the days leading up to Valentine’s, making them wonder if Jeremy is back, as the warped Valentine letters each of them receives are signed “JM”….
While the plot is very reminescent of 80s slashers, make no mistake, this is a 2000s slasher at hearth, and the attitude of era can be seen in how it handles the characters.
When most 80s slashers would at least have relatable or normal groups of teens (even if the actors had hit the “age multiplier” more than once), stereotyped but not deserving , Valentine has that sociopathic behaviour/approach that was common in the 2000s to make the future stabbing recipients not just douchy but completely unredeemable assholes, so to feed into the power fantasy of “edgy revenge against those who bullied me”, to make you not so much side but at the very least revel in the picking off of the unlikeable asses.
But honestly, i find it hard to even pretend these people didn’t have it coming, as every single one of these just ruined life for the protagonist, this isn’t a case of the killer going out of its way to off even people that didn’t had a hand in his ruination (not much, anyway), because everyone actually involved contributed in destroying his life and then being tossed into the “looney bin”.
I mean, he was labeled a rapist because the chubby chick didn’t want to admit exchanging tongue with him, even when charged with sexual assault she kept lying instead of telling everyone she lied about it in the first place (which she did because “she was fat back then”, actual explanation given by the character herself, btw), but he did plan to spare the only girl of the bunch that didn’t hate him or treated him like trash, as she really didn’t gratitously spite and harass him verbally.
Playing devil’s advocate aside (which it’s really fuckin easy here), he’s a psycho killer, obviously, but it’s hard to say these stereotypes didn’t have it coming or are otherwise some varying flavors of detestable douchery, and as a reminder, this applies to all characters (aside from the “nicer girl” of the bunch).
Yes, it’s really formulaic, the red herring (the first one) it’s so obvious i honestly got a laugh out of him being “suspicious” and forgot he was even supposed to be “bait”, not only because he basically disappears from the movie halfway through, but also the script clarifies further – and relatively early – the only thing it potentially had to make us belief the first red herring might be the killer (the initials on the letters), and the twist-on-the-twist reveal is…. not that bad.
This is where the “old fashioned” 80s sensibilites do not favor the movie, at all, quite the opposite, as if it was a 80s slasher, obscure or not, there would have been a good chance of the twist being some out-there shit or more shocking, even if it didn’t quite make sense (for better or worse), it would have made the movie more memorable.
On the flipside, it doesn’t take half the movie to set up the events that will come back to bite these characters in the ass, it’s mostly done in the short opening scene, there are a varied amount of kills (in the style of a 80s slasher that often opted for the “pick n mix” approach in the ways the killer made the cast join the choir invisible), with different murder tools and setpieces including an art gallery/installation, a morgue, a sauna, and they’re enjoyable but kinda tame and short, would have benefitted from being a bit more graphic, to be honest.
That said, the acting is decent, and the cast has good ol David Boreanaz (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Bones) as the alcoholic-in-rehab boyfriend of the “nicer” girl, whom surprisingly isn’t offed early on, plus, we also have the other staple of these, the renowed/long-in-tooth TV & film character actor playing the role of the sheriff/detective/policeman trying to figure out who’s behind these murders, here played by Fulvio Cecere, whom also played minor roles in a couple of Supernatural episodes, but mostly did play a lot of detectives and such in a lot of TV series (and also was in one of the Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil sequels, Afterlife).
Mind you, i get it not being well received in a post-Scream world, as it’s pretty formulaic, the 80s slasher sensibilities of the script (which is a-okay, all things considered) do not exactly always play nice with the other quirks, stylistic choices and characterization trend films of this genre had in the late 90s and 2000s, but honestly it’s quite entertaining, in spite of its middling over quality and the mesh of old fashioned slasher diktats with the new ones the 2000s brought along, forgoing any attempt of making a meta-take and harkening back a lot more to 80s entries like Prom Night (and other Holiday related slasher flicks of the era) more than Scream.
I think it’s fine for what it is, but it might also be due to me having an acquired taste for these old fashioned slasher and now 2000s era ones, as entropy consumes everything, me included, so as both styles are now “vintage”, ironically it has not aged as back as one would assume, even though its just an okay, mediocre-ish slasher from the very early 2000s with not much surprises or weird stand-outs moments, entertaining enough and decently acted, but also one that was bound to eventually be forgotten and fall through the cracks of slasher history.
Worth a punt for fans of the genre, if nothing else.
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