 The late nineties saw the resurrection of the slasher genre begun by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho and later popularized by John Carpenter in one of his better films, Halloween. Since then the genre itself has been massacred five ways past Sunday by the awful early installments in the Friday the 13th series, which didn’t get amusing until part six or thereabouts, and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street’s wisecracking jackass Freddy Krueger. It was Craven who dug up the slasher genre’s corpse with his smarmy Scream movies and others were quick to latch on, like remoras on the belly of a shark. Nothing whatsoever had changed, other than the fact that the women looked a hell of a lot better, sans their disgusting seventies hairstyles and equally awful eighties makeup. The men, likewise, underwent a significant change; no longer scruffy camp counselors, we instead found ourselves annoyed by an entirely new and even more obnoxious crew of boy-band rejects. And, of course, despite the fact that this new generation of slasher films followed the same basic formula as their eighties ancestors, it suddenly became trendy to see them as a sort of art-house genre. This is because sex and violence still sell just as well, if not better, than they did in the eighties, but by the mid-nineties we’d already become a society of uptight Puritanical assholes and had to invent this idea that the new slasher films parodied the old ones rather than imitated them so we could watch them guilt-free.
Though we’re all familiar with the major franchises – Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer – Taco Bell has encouraged us in an exaggerated New York accent to think outside the bun, so Doom took it upon his mighty self to watch Valentine, starring fake woman Denise Richards, her eyebrows, a slew of horrible, catty women and the sleazy, unshaven men who love them. The film doesn’t have a bad plot. As a matter of fact it has no plot at all, bad or otherwise. Some girl working at the local morgue is stalked by a tall man wearing a cupid mask. She runs. Her breasts bounce. She’s stabbed. Mission accomplished. Not only that, our masked protagonist (insofar as this film can be said to have one) is a fanboy at heart. He gets a nosebleed at the sight of jiggling flesh just like the rest of us.
 This brings me to the one thing that distinguishes this film from its older brothers. The killer is very tidy. In fact his kills are so fortuitously clean that the main characters – I forget who they are, because you really dislike every character in this film except for the masked murderer, who quickly gets in our good graces by summarily ending their screen time – don’t even realize people are dying until an hour into the fucking movie. The first girl he kills is already hiding inside a body bag in the morgue. Slit her throat, zip up the bag, no muss, no fuss. Likewise, after shooting his second victim full of arrows, her tosses her over a railing in her apartment building and, with a skill unmatched save by The A-Team’s B.A. Baracus, manages to plant her in a dumpster at the bottom of the stairs in just such a way that the lid slams shut.
That said, he sometimes seems to overdo it. For instance, he traps one nubile victim inside a hot tub, drills holes in the lid, and then, having drilled her shoulder, thus rendering her unconscious for some reason we shall never understand, opens the lid and tosses the drill into the hot tub, electrocuting her. It really wouldn’t matter one way or the other; the girls are far too wrapped up in stealing each other’s jewelry, sleeping with each other’s worthless boyfriends and doing that annoying exaggerated hip-sway when they walk to notice. And if you’re not sufficiently irritated by this pack of insufferable harpies, look who’s here to join in on the fun! It’s David Boreanaz, whom you may remember as Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once again typecast as a brooding twit.
 You may surmise that Doom does not like this movie. You would be correct in that assumption. I thought seeing people this annoying die would be more entertaining, and perhaps it would have been, had the film been handled differently. As it is, Valentine is simply dull, with a few upbeat moments to keep you watching until the utterly incomprehensible ending. Screw you, Taco Bell.
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Valentine