“What’s your favourite scary film set on Valentine’s Day?” the ghostfaced killer of Scream would possibly croak right into a voice modulator if he was feeling somewhat romantic in addition to homicidal. Any card-carrying horror geek might rattle off a couple of solutions, from the cult Nineteen Eighties bloodfest My Bloody Valentine to that movie’s stereoscopic ’00s remake to the justly forgotten post-Scream whodunit Valentine. This February, there’s a brand new addition to the canon of cupid slashers. But Heart Eyes doesn’t merely pervert the spirit of the Hallmark vacation on which it takes place. As Werewolves Within director Josh Ruben turns probably the most lovey-dovey night time of the yr right into a nightmare, what emerges is as a lot an precise romantic comedy as it’s a horror film. Just as the unique Scream indulged the very tropes it was skewering, so does its newest non secular descendant play like a Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson automobile rudely invaded – however not fairly derailed – by a masked maniac on the prowl.
Such style cocktails are a specialty of writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, whose respective filmographies embrace stabby spins on Groundhog Day, Freaky Friday, and It’s a Wonderful Life. In its crudely cheeky method, Heart Eyes commits to the sappy facet of its cinematic recipe: Date-movie connoisseurs will definitely acknowledge Ally (Olivia Holt), a heartbroken cynic who churns out disingenuous romantic platitudes for the advertising division of a Seattle-based jewellery firm. In typical rom-com trend, Ally has a bumbling meet-cute at her native espresso store, solely to find that clean, yoga-loving heartthrob Jay (Mason Gooding, who performs one of many next-gen survivors of the current Scream sequels) has been introduced on to run harm management on the marketing campaign she’s simply spearheaded. “It’s a farce, a lie,” she says of affection over their enterprise dinner. He bats his eyes and begs to vary.
As if engaged on the night time of Valentine’s Day weren’t unhealthy sufficient, Ally and Jay should cope with the Heart Eyes Killer, a prowling lunatic who confuses the 2 for one of many glad {couples} he (or she!) butchers. The film opens, à la Scream, with brutal double murder – a sequence that units the glibly hyper-violent tone. Set to the mawkish tune of LoneStar’s cheeseball ballad “Amazed,” the scene goes overboard on the slasher protocol of constructing us actually dislike the soon-to-be-deceased. Were the sacrificial lovebirds something greater than annoying, would we chortle at certainly one of them getting smashed like a juicy grape throughout her engagement at a dreamy vineyard?
Most of the splatter in Heart Eyes is comparably frivolous and cartoonish. Ruben’s adaptation of the Ubisoft VR sport Werewolves Within was equally indebted to the sardonic spirit and whodunit plotting of Scream, and his filmography has step by step grown extra express with every new film: His first, Scare Me, was a neatly minimalist experiment in campfire storytelling, the place the mayhem was all described and implied. Heart Eyes leaves little or no to the creativeness, however Ruben nonetheless applies a few of his personal to the suspense sequences, together with a chase aboard a carnival carousel and a scene the place Jay has to evade a slicing and dicing whereas handcuffed to a desk. There’s some brio, too, within the execution of the executions: When one unfortunate horndog will get a tire iron by means of the noggin, the filmmaker zooms backwards by means of the gaping wound to land on our petrified sweethearts-to-be.
Much of the film is extra canny than intelligent. The script’s thought of wit is having the broad finest good friend character (Gigi Zumbado) cram a half-dozen romantic comedy titles right into a single sentence. And whereas Scream truly obtained your coronary heart pounding – the important thing to that film’s success was that it mocked thriller conventions whereas giving them a genuinely thrilling exercise – Heart Eyes is horrifying largely in scare quotes. The ending blatantly rips off (or performs homage to, if you happen to needed to be beneficiant) that Wes Craven traditional. But it lacks the jolt of darkish discovery, to say nothing of the satisfaction of a thriller ingeniously solved: Woodsboro’s resident horror aficionado Randy Meeks could be fast to level out that when your forged listing contains solely half a dozen distinguished talking roles, it’s not very tough to play detective and accurately guess who’s been underneath the masks the entire time.
Still, as with Happy Death Day and Freaky, there’s enjoyable to be discovered within the gory fusion at play. Heart Eyes would possibly wink at rom-com clichés just like the gown montage and the climatic race to the airport, but it surely approaches its inventory love story with sincerity; the 2 leads by no means betray that they’re in on the joke or that they’re enjoying a quintessential instance of opposites-attract chemistry. As it seems, crossing a so-so horror film with a so-so romantic comedy improves each. That stated, there’s no faster strategy to underscore the relative flatness of your supposedly snappy banter than to set a complete sequence at a drive-in theater enjoying His Girl Friday. Talk about courting unflattering comparisons! It’s akin to devising a slasher throwback that works in footage from Halloween. Oh, wait.