“What’s your favorite scary movie set on Valentine’s Day?” the ghostfaced killer of Scream might croak into a voice modulator if he was feeling a little romantic as well as homicidal. Any card-carrying horror geek could rattle off a few answers, from the cult 1980s bloodfest My Bloody Valentine to that film’s stereoscopic ’00s remake to the justly forgotten post-Scream whodunit Valentine. This February, there’s a new addition to the canon of cupid slashers. But Heart Eyes doesn’t merely pervert the spirit of the Hallmark holiday on which it takes place. As Werewolves Within director Josh Ruben turns the most lovey-dovey night of the year into a nightmare, what emerges is as much an actual romantic comedy as it is a horror movie. Just as the original Scream indulged the very tropes it was skewering, so does its latest spiritual descendant play like a Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson vehicle rudely invaded – but not quite derailed – by a masked maniac on the prowl.
Such genre cocktails are a specialty of writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, whose respective filmographies include stabby spins on Groundhog Day, Freaky Friday, and It’s a Wonderful Life. In its crudely cheeky way, Heart Eyes commits to the sappy side of its cinematic recipe: Date-movie connoisseurs will certainly recognize Ally (Olivia Holt), a heartbroken cynic who churns out disingenuous romantic platitudes for the marketing department of a Seattle-based jewelry company. In typical rom-com fashion, Ally has a bumbling meet-cute at her local coffee shop, only to discover that smooth, yoga-loving heartthrob Jay (Mason Gooding, who plays one of the next-gen survivors of the recent Scream sequels) has been brought on to run damage control on the campaign she’s just spearheaded. “It’s a farce, a lie,” she says of love over their business dinner. He bats his eyes and begs to differ.
As if working on the night of Valentine’s Day weren’t bad enough, Ally and Jay have to contend with the Heart Eyes Killer, a prowling lunatic who confuses the two for one of the happy couples he (or she!) butchers. The movie opens, à la Scream, with brutal double homicide – a sequence that sets 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 making us really dislike the soon-to-be-deceased. Were the sacrificial lovebirds anything more than annoying, would we chortle at one of them getting smashed like a juicy grape during her engagement at a dreamy winery?
Most of the splatter in Heart Eyes is comparably frivolous and cartoonish. Ruben’s adaptation of the Ubisoft VR game Werewolves Within was similarly indebted to the sardonic spirit and whodunit plotting of Scream, and his filmography has gradually grown more explicit with each new movie: His first, Scare Me, was a smartly minimalist experiment in campfire storytelling, where the mayhem was all described and implied. Heart Eyes leaves very little to the imagination, but Ruben still applies some of his own to the suspense sequences, including a chase aboard a carnival carousel and a scene where Jay has to evade a slicing and dicing while handcuffed to a table. There’s some brio, too, in the execution of the executions: When one unlucky horndog gets a tire iron through the noggin, the filmmaker zooms backwards through the gaping wound to land on our petrified sweethearts-to-be.
Much of the movie is more canny than clever. The script’s idea of wit is having the broad best friend character (Gigi Zumbado) cram a half-dozen romantic comedy titles into a single sentence. And while Scream actually got your heart pounding – the key to that movie’s success was that it mocked thriller conventions while giving them a genuinely thrilling workout – Heart Eyes is scary mostly in scare quotes. The ending blatantly rips off (or plays homage to, if you wanted to be generous) that Wes Craven classic. But it lacks the jolt of dark discovery, to say nothing of the satisfaction of a mystery ingeniously solved: Woodsboro’s resident horror aficionado Randy Meeks would be quick to point out that when your cast list includes only half a dozen prominent speaking roles, it’s not very difficult to play detective and correctly guess who’s been under the mask the whole time.
Still, as with Happy Death Day and Freaky, there’s fun to be found in the gory fusion at play. Heart Eyes might wink at rom-com clichés like the dress montage and the climatic race to the airport, but it approaches its stock love story with sincerity; the two leads never betray that they’re in on the joke or that they’re playing a quintessential example of opposites-attract chemistry. As it turns out, crossing a so-so horror movie with a so-so romantic comedy improves both. That said, there’s no quicker way to underscore the relative flatness of your supposedly snappy banter than to set a whole sequence at a drive-in theater playing His Girl Friday. Talk about courting unflattering comparisons! It’s akin to devising a slasher throwback that works in footage from Halloween. Oh, wait.
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