Valentine (2001)

 

At a junior high school St. Valentine's Day dance in 1988, social outcast Jeremy Melton asks five girls to dance. The first three reject him spitefully and cruelly. The fourth, Kate, politely responds "Maybe later". Jeremy eventually gets a positive answer from the fifth girl, the overweight Dorothy, and the two end up making out beneath the bleachers.

However, when the school bully and his pals discover them, Dorothy falsely claims Jeremy sexually assaulted her. The bully and his pals publicly strip and severely beat Jeremy. The only one punished for these events is Jeremy himself. Those first three "mean girls" testify against him for "unwanted sexual advances", and he ends up in reform school and juvenile hall, and ultimately a mental institution.

Thirteen years later, in 2001, the bully and his pals have all died in unknown circumstances. When one of the five girls - the first Jeremy asked to dance - ends up murdered, the other four are contacted by police. At first, they are sad about the death but see no connection to themselves: their former friend had moved away for college and they didn't have much contact.

But when all of them except Kate receive threatening Valentine's cards, each signed "JM", they understandably become alarmed. Jeremy Melton appears to have vanished; all traces of him scrubbed from records. Is he now hunting them all, one by one? Is he perhaps already involved in their lives in some way, under an assumed identity? Or does the killer have other motivations and is merely using those long ago events as cover?

To be honest, you probably won't care about the answers to those questions, because this is not a very good film.

The simplest example of the film's failings is that on several occasions the detective investigating the case mentions facts that he could not know unless one of the other cast members told him, which we've not seen anyone do.  Now yes, this can just be explained as "well, someone told him off-screen", but it could also be a subtle hint that he's secretly the killer.  Or it could be a cheap trick to mislead the audience into thinking he's secretly the killer.  Or it could just be a bad editing job.  Without giving spoilers, I can say that I don't consider any of those to be good film-making choices.

Speaking of the detective, he's also rather creepy in his sexual fixation on the women in the case; but then, every single male in this movie is in one way or another a creepy scumbag of some kind. Probably this is to create as many suspects as possible, but it's a very lazy way to do it.

This also tries into another aspect of the film where it's not clear what the script is trying to do.  Is trying to be a "post-modern" slasher by deliberately making the killer's motivation be about women who weren't sexually available?  Or is it just an accident that the film represents a different kind of toxic masculinity?  The latter seems more likely to me, as little suggests that this script is smart enough to be a deliberate commentary. And if it is the former, it's not very well done.

Left unstated in the above is my fear that the truth may actually be that the writers were oblivious to the awfulness of their male characters.

That's all very well, you might say, but what about the kills?  If a slasher movie has good kills, much can be forgiven!  Well, on that front, Valentine does at least offer variety.  The killer lacks any specific murder method, employing different techniques for different people.  In a smarter film, these methods would all have an obvious correlation to previous events, but here I saw only once case where the means of death was something of a callback, and that was pretty thin. The lack of a motif or connection is a bit disappointing.

Then there's the final showdown of the film, which is preposterous in conception and works only because the script says it does. It's like the scene in City of Lost Children where a thousand things have to go exactly right to save the day, except without any of the self-aware glee of that scene.

Valentine is memorable mostly for a brief appearance from a pre-Grey's Anatomy Katherine Heigl. She plays the first on-screen murder victim, who chooses the world's worst hiding place when pursued by a killer.