Well, here's something that will make you wish you'd stayed home to watch Survivor instead of shelling out money at the movies. Hell, Valentine, another entry into the yearly, winter horror crapfest, even makes Temptation Island look good.

What we've got here is your standard grade horror flick in the vein of Scream and Urban Legend, revolving around a mysterious killer devising a supposed revenge plot -- a geeky kid who got a Carrie pulled on him in 6th grade. My how the tables have turned! The bunch of girls who refused to dance with him are now getting killed, 13 years later. Has this nobody returned from obscurity to exact his revenge for having punch poured on him?

We'll have one med school coed get pinched during a midnight autopsy. And of course she will hide in a body bag in a futile attempt to escape the man in the Cupid mask -- who's naturally doing his marauding on Valentine's Day. We'll see all manner of stabbings, shootings, beheadings, boilings, and whatnot -- until 90 minutes later the killer is unmasked.

The film presents us an oh-so-clever puzzler -- is it the 6th grader come back to haunt the girls? Is it one of their dates? Another man from the past? The cop? Or maybe it's the fisherman they ran over and left for dead on a winding road. The possibilities are as endless as they are random.

Valentine is headlined by actresses Denise Richards and Marley Shelton (who, with this and Sugar & Spice, appears to be on the Molly Ringwald road to career suicide), plus a gaggle of totally unknown supporting actresses whose only requirement for appearance appears to have been having very large breasts. (And despite this there's no nudity in the film at all!)

David Boreanaz joins the ladies in a truly pathetic role, stumbling through his lines like he has a hangover. No surprise: His character is a recovering alcoholic.

Prefaced by stern and multiple verbal warnings that Valentine is "very scary and very intense," sadly, we find the only very that applies to this film is very stupid. Simply, thrills are utterly lacking in the film. The murders are fully expected, unoriginal, and lacking in even the most basic sense of horror. And Cupid makes for a stalker about as frightening as Mary Poppins.

Maybe the only thing dumber than the film itself is the fact that it took four screenwriters to bicker over the writing credit. Now that's horror.



You're a mean one, Ms. Richards.