A masked killer makes Valentine’s Day a bloody affair in ‘Heart Eyes’
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
The “Scream” franchise has had six films, beginning with the 1996 original, a TV series, merchandise, and games. I am sure someone is working hard at a Broadway musical set in Woodsboro, Calif., standing in for Oz. Directed by Josh Ruben of the similarly spoofy ( and similarly uneven) “Werewolves Within” (2021) and written by Phillip Murphy (“The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”), Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day 2U”) and Michael Kennedy (“It’s a Wonderful Knife”), the oddly-titled comic slasher film “Heart Eyes” tells the story of a serial killer, who in opening scenes uses a machine for crushing grapes to pulverize a young woman on Valentine’s Day. Take that, Cupid.
The killer has previously butchered couples in Boston. Now, he is hard at work in Seattle (the film was shot in New Zealand), where he (we assume the killer is a man) murders a photographer and an annoying couple who have just gotten engaged. The film boasts a “meet cute” sequence staged in a coffee shop where laughs are—Have we ever heard this one before?—spun out of the complexity of the coffee orders of the male and female leads. They are Ally (Disney TV alumna Olivia Holt, “Kickin’ It”) and Jay (Mason Gooding of the 2022 “Scream,” of course). Ally is a depressed singleton who works at an advertising agency run by the extremely peculiar person played by “SNL” veteran Michaela Watkins in a “Cruella de Vil” fright wig. Jay is a freelance hotshot brought in to rev things up at the agency. After dinner at a posh restaurant, Ally and Jay are targeted by HEK ( the cops’ diminutive for the Heart Eyes Killer), who pops out of Ally’s closet, brandishing a knife. Boo.
The rest of the film depicts how Ally and Jay, who are, we are reminded, not a couple, try to evade the determined killer and stay alive. At one point, they visit a hybrid drive-in/amusement park, where Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic screwball comedy “His Girl Friday” is playing on the screen and where the killer has lots of bystander couples to slay, including van-living hippie stoners straight out of a “Friday the 13th” film. We are reminded that some of the world’s most famous young lovers—Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose from “Titanic” and Bonnie and Clyde—met a bad end. These cultural references are the film’s equivalent of the “meta-commentary” of the “Scream” films.
The film’s humor is mostly infantile or adolescent at best. We get an old Uber driver who plays Cupid with romantic Spotify playlists, Ally’s handsome ex, who has a British accent, shows up with his new squeeze, prompting Ally to kiss Jay, pretending he is her new guy, another cliché. Later, Ally tries to hide her brightly-colored sex toy in a scene set in her messy bedroom. Most of the scares are the usual jump cuts. We meet police officers Seattle Detective Shaw (Jordana Brewster in the Courteney Cox role) and Detective Hobbs (Devon Sawa, the film’s most adept comic actor). The unattached Shaw becomes romantically interested in Jay, even though he is a suspect and cuffed to a table.
The killer wears a full-head mask with heart-shaped eye openings and built-in night vision (it’s dopey-looking and nowhere near as creepy as the Ghostface visage). Heart Eyes also wields a crossbow, throwing knives, a brass-knuckles-handed short sword, a gun, and anything that comes to hand, including a cross-shaped tire iron. The dialogue is laced with relationship and workplace jargon, yoga, vineyard and spa references, and such expressions as “Are you serious?” “I’m sorry, what?” and “Yeah, no,” to signal—I suppose—that the characters are no smarter than the people in the audience. Ally is completely cynical about love, the result of terrible experiences, so you know how this ends. A large part of the film’s problem is a lack of chemistry between Holt and Gooding. They are certainly not Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, if you know what I mean.
The formulaic action will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the “Scream” films, which were inspired in large part by John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978). Gigi Zumbado (TV’s “Bridge and Tunnel”) is noteworthy in the thankless “girlfriend of Ally” role. The climax is set in a candlelit church, where, as in the “Scream” series, HEK is unmasked, and plot twists are explained. “Heart Eyes” ends with The Supremes’ crooning their 1966 hit “You Can’t Hurry Love.” You can’t hurry novelty, either.
‘Heart Eyes’
Rating: R for strong violence and gore, language, and some sexual content.
Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Jordana Brewster
Director: Josh Ruben
Writer: Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon, Michael Kennedy
Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes
Grade: C+
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