Name: Film Review: Valentine (2001)
Item: Valentine
Rating: 20
Author: @drax

(source: tmdb.org

Film can fail at the box office for variety of reasons. In case of Valentine, 2001 horror film directed by Jamie Blanks, alleged reason was careless remark by actress Denise Richards during promotional interview, which gave away crucial detail of the film, thus spoiling it. But even without it, commercial failure of this film was well-deserved.

The film is based on the eponymous novel by Tom Savage. The plot has a prologue set in 1988 San Francisco where Jeremy Melton (played by Joel Palmer), nerdish junior high school takes courage to ask five popular girls for dance at the prom. The result isn’t only utter humiliation, but the trauma that would permanently wreck his life. Thirteen years later five junior high school divas – Paige Prescott (played by Denise Richards), Kate Davies (played by Marley Shelton), Dorothy Wheeler (played by Jessica Capshaw), Lily Voight (played by Jessica Cauffiel) and Shelley Fisher (played by Katherine Heigl) - are now university students, which suffer because lack of proper romantic life. Those problems become trivial when a man with Cupid mask begins to send threatening messages before he kills them one by one. Kate, whose circle of friends begins to shrink, desperately wants to discover killer’s identity and becomes convinced that the killer is Melton. The boy has, however, all but disappeared many years ago and nobody knows how he looks as an adult. It could be even Adam Carr (played by David Boreanaz), Kate’s former boyfriend, journalist and recovering alcoholic.

Three years earlier Australian director Jamie Blanks had modest success with Urban Legend, his feature film that, like this one, tried to exploit Hollywood renaissance of teen slasher films that had used to be popular in 1980s. While Urban Legend wasn’t anything to write home about (despite spawning a sequel, it was much better than Valentine. The main reason for that could be found in Blanks and four screenwriters exhausting their all creativity on basic concept – killer obsessed with love and romance – and filled the rest of the film with terribly annoying cliches that make even the most formulaic 1980s teen slasher films look like classics. Another issue is terrible cast, with main actresses being selected on the account of their looks with their acting ability being completely out of consideration (especially in the case of Denise Richards, who is simply terrible). Characters those actresses play are annoying and the audience will hardly wait to see them slaughtered by masked killer; this, however, happens too slow and killer also, without any rhyme and reason, takes out innocent people who just happened to be nearby. Blanks also tries to hide killer’s identity with red herrings that wouldn’t fool any viewer with little experience or common sense. Even worse are Blanks’ attempts to spice the film with some humour, because the gags are utterly unfunny. And, finally, unlike 1980s slasher films, here new puritanical rules of Hollywood preclude use of sex and nudity that could have turned Valentine into some sort of “guilty pleasure”. As a result, this film represents complete waste of time and even the most loyal fans of its main actresses would probably prefer to watch them in something different.

RATING: 2/10 (-)