Valentine
Boreanaz doesn't even take off his shirt. I feel cheated.

Denise Richards and Marley Shelton as two vapid characters whose main motivation is the search for a good man and/or a good lay.

I saw this thing on the Discovery Channel once about religious zealots who spend most of their time wailing and flogging themselves bloody. After seeing Valentine, I'm thinking that the people behind it might want to find this self-flaggelating religion and convert. At least that way they'd save the rest of us the trouble of administering the beatings; they could just punish themselves. Either way, some sort of terrible pain sounds like a good idea for them. If I can sit through the film they made, they can make it up to me with their pound of flesh and pint of blood.

The appeal of teen slasher films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer is, or so I'm told, trying to guess who the killer is, and who's going to survive. Valentine is overly aware of this appeal, which makes it less scary and more schizophrenic as it tries to keep the killer's identity a secret. By the end of the film, they've jerked you around enough that you just won't care, and considering the way the film ends, you may find yourself still befuddled even when they seem to be spelling it out for you.

Of course, it's not bad to be confused. It doesn't mean you missed something, or that you're terribly slow-witted. The fault for the confusion lies in the script, which consists of a number of highly predictable and sometimes completely pointless murder scenes with some "plot" in between for filler. Valentine leaves audiences with a number of questions as the final credits roll. Why doesn't anybody notice that there's a bunch of dead people lying around? How come the killer always walks calmly, and the helpless girl victim runs away pretty fast, and yet she never gets away? Why do the people who know they've been targeted by a psychopath constantly wander into dark, abandoned areas by themselves? Why don't any of these people ever change their lightbulbs when the old ones burn out? Why is it that Jamie Blanks is still working? Wasn't Urban Legends enough to inflict on us all?

"Think I'm sexy now? Wait 'til you see me with my shirt off. And in chains. Did I mention the chains?"

You're better off not trying to answer any of these questions. Valentine possesses neither logic nor story, nor even entertainment value. The female leads are all vapid airheads who don't seem to have jobs, families, lives, or any sort of interests outside of their sex lives. So you may feel it's worth the price of admission just to see these female stereotypes die horribly, but that alone didn't do it for me; I didn't even get to see lead man David Boreanaz take off his shirt, but did see more of Denise Richards than I ever wanted to. Poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly directed, and just plain bad (and not in that "it's so bad it's good" sort of way), the only reason to watch Valentine is the ample display of tits and ass. And of course, if that's all you're after, it's much cheaper -- and probably more satisfying -- to get off the couch, get to the video store down the street, and rent a little porn.

DROOL FACTOR: Well, there's David Boreanaz, of course, and a few cute guys who all look the same. Nobody really stands out. Except for David, I mean. He stands out, 'cause he's really damn tall.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: Plenty of grisly murders, puddles of blood, and quite a few corpses during a medical school sequence, but it's nothing you haven't seen in the many lame teen slasher films that preceded this one.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: Oh, please. Don't make me laugh. These chicks couldn't fend off a weak little five-year-old girl, much less a psycho killer. And they're stupid as sin.

-- Lisa Kincaid

Valentine is now playing in theaters across the US.

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