Movie Review: Valentine (2001)

A slasher flick that stumbles around looking for a new idea - any new idea - to contribute to the genre. Finding absolutely none, it dies a painfully boring death on the field of bankrupt inspiration.

Rather that describe yet another collection of deserve-to-die drama queens getting unimaginatively slaughtered because years earlier they were mean to their 6th grade class dork, it is much more interesting to examine some related career trajectories. Proving without a doubt that being a Bond girl is no guarantee of success, Denise Richards nosedives from co-starring with Bond in The World Is Not Enough (1999) to Valentine two short years later.

This does not discourage director Jamie Blanks from finding all possible reasons to point his cameras at Richards (a) in profile, as that is how her breast curves are best revealed, (b) in a totally superfluous sex foreplay scene in which she leaves a lecherous would-be boyfriend tied-up and naked, only for the script to completely forget about the poor guy from that point on; and (c) in a bikini and wet, before killing her anyway.

Heading in the other direction in terms of relative career success, Valentine strangely proved itself to be a training ground for two future Grey's Anatomy actresses. Katherine Heigl is the first victim to be slaughtered in the movie, and in the spookiest achievement of the film, she is a medical student! Let's not dwell on the fact that Heigl's brief scenes, which open Valentine, appear to be almost wholly unrelated to the rest of the movie.

Jessica Capshaw gets the role with the Miss Piggy big-boned psychological trauma overtones; she complains in Valentine that she never got the hunky guys; years later she emerged as a lesbian doctor on Grey's Anatomy. 

The rest of the cast members simply strengthened their grip on obscurity after Valentine, a fate that the film itself fully earns.

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