DVD Review: Valentine (2001)
Valentine (2001)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Release Date: July 24, 2001
Directed By: Jamie Blanks
Cast: Marley Shelton, David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, Jessica Capshaw, Fulvio Cecere
Brutal As Hell Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Review By: Annie Riordan
Five impossibly beautiful girlfriends – brainy Shelley, sweet Kate, slutty Paige, ditzy Lily and fatass Dorothy (who, by the way, looks about as overweight as an Ethiopian orphan) – are bound together by a seemingly forgettable event that occurred at a school dance thirteen years earlier. But the nerdy loser they all took turns rejecting that night hasn’t forgotten about them – and now he’s back, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The only problem is he could be any one of the assholish cockheads who parade through this film, all of whom reminded me why I stopped dating three years ago and why I hate Valentine’s Day with the white hot intensity of a galaxy annihilating supernova.
I give this film two stars – one for the therapeutic pleasure of watching said assholish cockheads get slaughtered along with the one-dimensional females, and one more for Marley Shelton who plays our sweet heroine Kate and who looks a lot like Barbara Crampton in ReAnimator. In case you’re wondering who the hell she is, she popped up in Grindhouse Planet Terror a few years later, playing the hypo-happy nurse Dakota. I would give it another star for the power-sdrill/drowning death of Denise Richards, but hey – girl was married to Charlie Sheen, I think she’s suffered enough.
However, the rest of this film is stunningly stupid, painfully predictable and outrageously airheaded. Every jumpscare can be seen coming a mile away, every death has been done before and exactly how the fuck does one insert live maggots into chocolates? That just defies all kinds of logic. Top it off with an ending that makes NO sense whatsoever and you have exactly one hour and thirty six seconds of wasted time.
Valentine makes a last minute gift from the corner gas station (think: cheap panties folded up into a rose) look like a snazzy gift. I can’t even recommend it to haters of the Heart Shaped Holiday – it’s just a reminder of how shallow and pointless the whole thing really is.
