‘Valentine’ Turns 25

A movie like Valentine basically asks us to believe that the one character we know is the killer isn’t the killer. In all fairness, David Boreanz only had about two weeks to film all his scenes in this movie and his character of Adam Carr never does really seem to fit the storyline.  

I don’t doubt there were script changes during filming which meant some of his scenes had to be tweaked to make sense. But he mostly just walks in and out of several scenes while other scenes just have him sitting somewhere talking to another character as if it was intended to be a different, bigger scene.  

This movie might have been based on a novel, but I’m sure it was done because there was a script that had been sitting in a filing cabinet Warner Bros. Studios for years that bore a resemblance to Tom Savage’s novel by the same name which had been published in 1998. The Art Buchwald vs. Paramount case had exposed “Hollywood Accounting” and other unscrupulous actions. The major studio was also still trying to screw Sylvester Stallone out of all the money it owed him for Demolition Man.  

So, it would be cheaper to buy film rights than it would to face a lawsuit. The movie, itself, is just another slasher flick in which a circle of friends of women in their mid to late 20s are terrorized by a killer wearing a cherub cupid mask. They are also given disturbing Valentine’s cards by someone signing “JM.”  

During the movie’s opening prologue, we learn that a junior high teenager Jeremy Milton (Joel Palmer) asked out each of the circle of friends to dance at a Valentine’s Day mixer and they mostly rejected him with insults. Yet, he still managed to dance and even go behind the bleachers to make out with Dorothy, who by 1988 standards was considered obese. They are discovered by a group of boys who begin to taunt them but Dorothy denies it was consensual and Jeremy is then beaten up by the boys.  

And because it’s a different era and Dorothy comes from a wealthy family in the San Francisco Bay area, Jeremy is expelled and later institutionalized. I mean no reason the guy goes psycho. School officials are nothing more than bureaucrats who will do whatever those with the most money tell them to do. I once had a teacher get on to me because I was behind rowdy when I got back at another kid who had been taunting me.  

The movie was directed by Jamie Blanks, who wasn’t the first choice as it was Richard Kelly, who left to go on to make Donnie Darko. (Yet, we’ve learned he wasn’t as skilled as a director as the final cut was taken away from him and re-edited into what it is now.) Blanks was coming off the impressive Urban Legend, which is an impressive B-movie with a borderline A-list cast that included Jared Leto, Alicia Witt and Joshua Jackson.  

Blanks was probably having to deal with too many cooks in the writing process. But I feel as an Australian, he seems to be sticking it to the pompous Gen Xers of the Y2K era. Everyone in this movie seems like they belong in a GQ or HM magazine. Katherine Heigl plays the first victim as Shelley Fisher, a med student who is killed following a bad date with Jason Marquette (Adam J. Harrginton) who speaks in the third person. Of course, the name Jason is a reference to Friday the 13^th and Harrington plays the snobby person with a hilarious Kubrick stare.  

But he’s a red herring. There’s a lot of other red herrings as well including Max Raimi (Johnny Whitworth) an avant-garde artist who is the boyfriend of Lily Voight (Jessica Caulfield), one of the people who rejected Jeremy. The movie’s protagonist, Kate Davies (Marley Shelton), has a neighbor, Gary Taylor (Claude Duhamel), who stalks her and steals her underwear.  

Heigl herself filmed all of her scenes in about three days as she was still under contract on the TV show Roswell. Still her scenes fit better than Boreanz as Adam who is Kate’s estranged boyfriend. He’s battling alcoholism which seems to be just thrown in to explain why the two are always lovey-dovey on each other.  

Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw) has a love interest, Campbell Morris (Daniel Cosgrove), move in with her in her mansion but he is out to get some money as he’s a scam artist. Denise Richards rounds out the Mean Girls circle of friends as the sultry Paige Prescott.  

Eventually, all of this culminates at a Valentine’s Day party at Dorothy’s mansion. And tensions rise between Dorothy and Kate hinting that Dorothy might be the killer. But considering how Capshaw, the stepdaughter of Steven Spielberg himself, is almost a foot shorter than the towering Boreanz, it’s just not possible. And Marshall Virtue, a stuntman/actor who stands in the killer, is taller than Capshaw.  

The movie doesn’t really work but I think it has to do with a lot of questions such as why doesn’t Jeremy go after the bullies. Jeez, I asked out 16 women to the senior prom and I have no ill-will against any of them. Also, there’s a fake-out of the killer’s identity that is sloppy as the laws of physics prevent it. But a lot of horror movies have these goofs.  

It’s not the best horror movie and the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards gave it the award for the Worst Movie. But I think if you don’t take it as seriously now and view the killer as someone going after all the pompous rich people who always have to get their way, then it works as a revenge movie.  

What do you think? Please comment.