| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Jamie Blanks
Starring: Denise Richards, David Boreanaz, Marley Shelton, Jessica Capshaw
Screenplay: Tom Savage, Donna Powers
Tagline: Remember that kid everyone ignored on Valentine's Day? - He remembers you.
Country: USA
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It's Valentine's Day 1988 and young
geek Jeremy Melton is about as unpopular as you
can get, receiving one cruel rejection after another
from the most popular girls at the school.
Finally, just as it looks like our desperate friend
is about to get a little snogging action with
the school "fatty", a group of bullies
intervene and Jeremy is humiliated in front of
the entire school.
Jump to thirteen years later, and
the nasty young girls who so cruelly rejected
young Jeremy have now blossomed into incredibly
attractive women. Despite their all round
good looks, it seems as though none of these women
is able to find romance, and with Valentine's
day fast approaching, they set about getting their
love lives in order. Before long, one of
the group is brutally murdered, and the ladies
start to receive strange Valentine's gifts bearing
the initials J.M. Has the young man they
treated so poorly all those years ago come back
to seek revenge, or is the man in question already
a part of their lives without them actually knowing
it?
Director Jamie Blanks certainly
has a great eye for visuals, and this film is
fantastic too look at, with Blank's use of colour
and lighting techniques proving to be particularly
impressive. Underneath the slick exterior however
lies something slightly less satisfying.
All the ingredients for a good slasher movie are
present here: An impossibly attractive cast, a
suitable array of potential suspects, a wide variety
of secondary characters to kill off when things
start to get slow, red herrings aplenty, and most
importantly, an impressive selection of
lethal instruments such as power drills, kitchen
knives and axes. All the pieces are put
into place, but somehow it all went wrong.
One thing that does set this film apart from others
of it's ilk is the fact that since the killers
motivation has already been established before
the opening credits, we are spared the obligatory
"I killed all those people because..."
speech that usually takes place when the masked
slashers identity is finally revealed. Blanks
does his best with the material on offer, and
at times this did look like it might rise above
the level of many other recent "post scream"
genre offerings, but unfortunately in the
end, we are left with a fairly un-original and
un-inspiring movie.
It should be said in the directors
defence however that this film was heavily cut
by the studio before it's release. Some
of the killings are quite elaborate, but mostly
appear to be very tame. A few moments of
genuine "shock value" may have been
just the ingredient to give this film a much needed
boost. |
