Valentine’s Day has had a long and fruitful collaboration with movie horror. Back in 1931, for instance, the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, arguably the original American horror movie, was nationally released on February 14, as “the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!”
Later came the 1981 slasher movie My Bloody Valentine and its 2009 remake, and the 1982 X-Ray with Barbie Benton (originally titled Be My Valentine, or Else), the 2000 Lover’s Lane and Valentine in 2001. All of these exercises in murder seem at least partly spawned by the desire to undercut romance’s yearly observance. With the exception, maybe, of Christmas, it’s possible that no other holiday inspires quite as much resentment and/or anxiety as Cupid’s big day.
Out this weekend is the latest Valentine shocker, Heart Eyes, after the shape of the scary mask’s eyeholes. Insufferable lovers have been gruesomely targeted for the past couple of years in a cross-country slaughter spree on the date; this year, Seattle is the stop. Ally (Olivia Holt), a young marketer for a jewelry company, cute-meets Jay (Mason Gooding) at a coffeeshop in that town; turns out by a wacky coincidence that the two have to work together on a new campaign. As they begin to fall for each other, they’re stalked, and eventually end up on the run and fighting for their own – and each other’s – lives.
The big shocker scenes are full of hideous splatter; victims are dispatched by everything from machetes to arrows to a lug wrench to a wine press. The gore effects appear to be almost entirely computer-generated, and they have the same lack of substance and visceral punch as similar scenes in recent years in films like Thanksgiving, Cocaine Bear and Renfield. They’re funny at first, and then distasteful, but not really deeply scary or even deeply gross.
This hardly matters, however, as Heart Eyes really seems less like a horror picture than like a send-up of Hallmark-style romantic comedies, with a bloody twist. On that level, it’s fairly amusing. Director Josh Ruben, working from a script by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, keeps the mayhem moving, and Holt and Gooding handle the twee dialogue agreeably.
A lengthy sequence takes place at a drive-in that’s showing His Girl Friday; maybe not the best move here to remind us of a movie that good. Heart Eyes is no His Girl Friday, and it’s no horror masterpiece either, but if you’re in “Love Stinks” mode this year, it still might be good for a few laughs.
