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Valentine
Be nice to total loser geeks
2001
Review: September 18, 2007
Director: Jamie Blanks
Starring: Denise Richards, David Boreanaz, Marley Shelton, Katherine Heigl
It'll only barely help.
THE SETUP:
Someone's sending women valentines, then killing them.
DISCUSSION:
Having watched Urban Legend, which was a lot more amusing than I expected, it was recommended that I watch Valentine, the next film by the same director. And while there were a lot of similarities, somehow this one, while being a better movie, was also more boring and ultimately less satisfying.
We begin way back at the middle school dance, where we meet Jeremy Melton, this geeky and unpopular kid. He goes up to various girls and asks them to dance, and they all bitchily tell him they'd sooner die, or something to that effect. Except the heroine, who tells him "maybe later." He then sees a pudgy girl sitting all by herself, and asks her to dance. They soon end up making out under the school bleachers, and are accosted by four jocks, one of whom takes the punch bowl—which was apparently just sitting way up in the bleachers there [it's a non-traditional school]—and dumps it over Jeremy's head in a manner that can't help but bring Carrie to mind. The girl, Dorothy, says that Jeremy attacked her and calls him a pervert. They strip Jeremy down to his underwear and shove him out into the middle of the dance floor, where everyone laughs at him. Cruel kids. Sadly, no internal voices in Jeremy's head shriek: "They're all gonna laugh at you!" and the screen just fades out. Oh, but there was one kid at the dance—which is not a costume dance—who is inexplicably in a cupid mask. You know those confident middle school kids, always eager to be the only one in costume at a non-costume party.
So, 13 years later, we meet Shelley, played by Katherine Heigl, recently so charming in Knocked Up. She's on a date with Jason, this would-be suave asshole who speaks about himself in the third person. She dumps him and returns to the lab to cut up a corpse! After a lot of creepy noises, some high-pitched strings and a false scare, she gets a macabre valentine, talking about slitting her throat. She returns to the lab for some more high-pitched strings and creepy noises, this time culminating in some chasing and hiding, and finally gets killed.
We now join Denise Richards as Paige and Marley Shelton [so fun in Grindhouse] as Kate as they go to turbo dating. Kate isn't sure, because she's only half broken-up from Adam, but Paige says Adam is a drunk and she needs to find someone else. The deal is you only get to talk for 30 seconds, then move on to the next "date," and this leads to a scene straight out of romantic comedies where the dates are all horrible losers. You'll notice that the guys are saying things you might get around to after 30 minutes of talking with a stranger—like deep details of a prior relationship—but not anything anyone would find in a 30-second biographical sketch. Just as a reasonable guy finally appears, Paige leans over and comes on to him, saying that Kate is still in a relationship. Can you believe what a bitch?!?!? But apparently this is acceptable behavior, because they're still friends afterward. This is why I have to stay home watching movies, because I cannot handle moving in these cutthroat social circles. They find out that Shelley was killed and are all like "Oh my God," then go the funeral the next day, where Paige is chastised for wearing a slinky cocktail dress, and Kate runs into Adam, who is played by David Boreanaz, of Angel fame. Apparently there's some winking line in here somewhere about "he's no angel," but I didn't catch it. Boreanaz is doing his "I'm just a big dumb puppy!" routine, and tries to get Kate to go out with him again, saying he hasn't had a drink for three weeks [THREE WHOLE WEEKS! HE'S CURED!], etc. She's reluctant. But sexy.
Then we meet Dorothy, who has trimmed her figure and is not "fat" except when compared to Denise Richards, and she lets this red herring Campbell, who she has been dating for a month, live with her rich family. She is planning a big Valentine's Day party, which will obviously be the climax. Some Asian woman comes out of nowhere and volleys some bitchitude with Dorothy, until Dorothy calls her a "mail order bride from hell," and then we find out that this is: DOROTHY'S STEPMOTHER! Because, you see now it can be told, this guy Jamie Blanks seems to have a real comedic appreciation for young, hot women being BITCHES, and both Urban Legend and this film are filled with scenes of women being total snotty vixens to each other [and of course men] that are kind of like British The Office: There's no laugh track, and no comedic beats, so you're left thinking to yourself "this is kind of funny," but without any filmmaking cues telling you you're supposed to laugh. This becomes most apparent in the next scene, when Kate hears a creepy noise in the middle of her shower, then her water cuts out while she's got a bunch of shampoo in her hair, and she's finally reduced to dunking her head in the toilet to rinse it. Is it misogynist? Maybe, but the men in this film are presented as such drooling, delusional sex pigs that it can't exactly be placed in their favor. It's misanthropic, put it that way.
SPOILERS > > >
We then go to this art opening, which is a maze of videos with people saying dating-related things like "What do YOU want to do?" You'll notice that, just as Urban Legend portrayed a college campus where every single person was utterly obsessed with urban legends and talked about virtually nothing else, here it is all [all, all] about dating. While the public is walking through the maze, the artist, Max, wants Dorothy to engage in a three-way with him and this other woman. In the maze. Which the public is walking through. I guess he's got a little bit of performance artist in him. Anyway, the unrelated third woman is killed with an arrow. Which is stupid, as she had nothing to do with taunting Jeremy Melton, but then again, we need to keep some of the real perpetrators alive until later, and we also need to regularly kill people… so there ya go. A killer with a motive… and a little spare time on his hands.
So then the local detective—who is pretty hot, he looks like Veronica Mars' dad, who I find totally alluring—interviews the young women and informs them that the killer may be Jeremy Melton. But he has grown up and may have had plastic surgery, so no one knows what he may look like now. So then the detective makes a cocky, delusional pass at Paige, and she of course bitchily refuses him. This is about the third or fourth guy in the movie who has come on to women as though he is God's gift, and shown no consciousness that she might feel otherwise. This seems to be partly so the women can further display their snide kiss-off lines, but mostly so we can have a bunch of male suspects who seem to be the type who don't take no for an answer. What it really results in is a portrait of a VERY strange town.
So after the murders of two more unrelated characters, it's time for Dorothy's big party. By the way, you'll notice that the killer apparently doesn't go after the guys from the middle school dance, who arguably did more damage to him than the dance refusals of the girls. Anyway, Dorothy throws a HUGE party, like transforming her entire [parents'] house into a high-end nightclub, but is bummed because Campbell didn't show up. Mostly because he's dead. Then we get still ANOTHER guy being a cocky asshole as the guy from turbo dating pulls down his pants in front of Paige and expects her to just get busy. She recovers by changing into her swimsuit [she keeps one at Dorothy's house?] and preening in the hot tub. The killer closes a door behind her, and during the few seconds she's turned around, apparently comes to within four feet of her, literally right in front of her [as she's turned away], and places a rose across the hot tub. Then he puts the clear, non-fogging plexiglass cover over the tub with Paige in it [do they make clear plexiglass hot tub covers?], then starts to drill through it, and finally tosses the drill in with her, electrifying her. Buh-bye Paige. She was kind of the most fun.
So in here Kate has discovered Adam drinking, and she's all upset, and it's not too long after that she starts to think that he's the killer. Blah, blah, big chase, and the killer is dead. And it's Dorothy! And then the movie keeps going on… but only enough to show us Kate in Adam's arms, and then a last little thing to inform us that—Adam actually is the killer! The end.
< < < SPOILERS END
It wasn't very good. I was seriously bored after an hour, with 30 minutes left to go. Since these movies are so arbitrary—you could add or remove elements and characters to make it as long or short as you like, without losing the overall story—the sense of "do I really have to sit through this?" starts to set in. Plus it's all so monotonous and so many scenes are the same—Paige is a bitch, Dorothy is insecure, men make crude, overconfident come-ons—that it just starts to get dull. It's not particularly scary, either. It's too bad, because clearly director Blanks has an amusing sensibility and interesting way with presenting humor mixed with horror, but it just didn't come off all that well here. In the other direction, it also doesn't really have the undercurrent of pathos or passionate revenge that might have sustained it otherwise, mostly because the killer offs people willy-nilly, not just the ones he's trying to get revenge on. The movie also seems much longer than it actually is. Oh dear, it's kind of a bust.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you'll watch virtually any slasher film, or really find bitchy young women amusing.
