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Valentine
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We begin with a frenetic, choppy flashback to the trauma which started a psychotic, young serial killer on his merry way: a geeky boy at a school dance, mocked by all the glamorous, in-crowd girls and rejected even by the dumpy outsider he considered to be his soul mate. As in most sequels in the Friday the 13th, Scream or Halloween series, such reminders of the original film prime viewers in the know and inform those who aren't. But hang on – this isn't Valentine 2. It's the inaugural movie in a series that – one fervently hopes – will never materialise. The fact that Valentine starts in such a breathless, music video fashion is a sure sign that the teen-slasher cycle is in trouble. The added fact that even its director, Australian-born Jamie Blanks (Urban Legend, 1998), publicly promises never to make another film of this ilk is a still surer sign. There's not much going on in Valentine. Its shocks and ambiguities are completely formulaic. As we follow the lives of these clueless teenagers, including Paige (Denise Richards) and Dorothy (Kate Logie), we are left to ponder only two things: who is to die next, and which suspicious looking male facade hides the identity of the jilted killer? Diehard film buffs sometimes find themselves peering into bargain-basement horror titles like Monte Hellman's Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989) for the merest glimmer of a once-acclaimed director's artistry. Blanks is no Hellman, so it is perhaps only misplaced patriotism that had me straining to appreciate the tiniest touches of craft in the choice of angles and sound effects. Valentine deserves only one footnote in the history of popular culture. Mainstream American movies have always had a hard time depicting modernist and postmodernist art of the loft or gallery variety. Here, our characters attend the opening of a multimedia installation – a critique of consumerism in which huge mouths in extreme close-up murmur "want me, love me" on video screens. This is uncannily similar to a video art exhibition (by the duo "Randelli") which appeared in Melbourne in the early '80s. Faced with such a spectacle, the girls of Valentine initiate a lively and novel form of art criticism: they deride the exhibition as "pornographic", but then engage in sex play with various surly men in its dark recesses. © Adrian Martin May 2001 |
