A Horrifying Bore

Valentine Dir:Jamie Blanks Starring Denise Richards Kevin Boreanz Kate Capshaw 2001 R, 96 m RATING: 2 out of 10

FORGET-ME: A masked killer offs college students who deserve to be killed in this supremely inept entry into the teen horror genre.

Just when you thought the teen horror genre had been milked to death, along comes Valentine, a throwback to the campy, laughable fare that tried to pass itself off as horror and has since been ridiculed by Scream and its lesser counterparts.  But Valentine doesn't even measure up to the campy fun of those bad flicks - it's just plain bad. Valentine (released to coincide with Valentine's Day) has literally nothing to do with the holiday.  We begin with a Carrie-rip off, in which a 6th grade boy is ridiculed at a school dance when he is accused of assaulting (ridiculous in its own right) a girl.  Bullies then pour red punch (subsituted for pig's blood) on him in slow-motion.  Skip ahead to the students' college years, where girls who rejected him find themselves being stalked and murdered. So the movie lumbers on with poorly written dialogue, one-dimensional characters, ridiculous plot points, and lazy writing.  For example, after a few of the girls are killed, the remaining girls decide throw a party rahter than opting to be cautious.  With such a dumbed-down plot, at least a few decent death scenes can be expected; the movie instead eschews this and we are given poor, bloodless scenes of implied killings: yes, Valentine even fails to provide gore. An exercise in uninspired filmmaking, lazy scripting, wooden acting, and bloodless death, Valentine is surely one of the worst recent additions to the thoroughyl excavated and empty teen horror genre, failing on every possible level of horror.  What's worse, the ending leaves the door wide open to a sequel.  Let's hope we don't get a film titled "Easter" anytime soon.

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