Producers: Christopher Landon, Greg Gilreath and Adam Hendricks Director: Josh Ruben Screenplay: Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, Devon Sawa, Jordana Brewster, Ben Black, Latham Gaines, Chris Parker and Lauren O’Hara Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment/TriStar
Grade: C-
Watching “Heart Eyes,” you might be tempted to rewrite the old show business adage “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” to read “Killing is easy, comedy is hard,” because if horror movies are popular today—modest budgets, potentially big returns—horror comedies, once a relative rarity, have become equally so. But it’s a tricky genre, needing a clever premise and a canny balance of scares and laughs.
“Heart Eyes” bungles the mixture. It offers up plenty of gross-out murders, starting with one involving two loathsome influencers filming their “proposal” at a lush Washington vineyard. Both of them die—the airhead girl in an especially bloody trap involving a mechanized winepress—as does their inept photographer. But when it comes to adding humor to the mayhem, the desperation is all too evident: the sequence oozes gore, but elicits barely a chuckle.
That problem afflicts everything that follows. Basically this is just an old-fashioned slasher movie melded with a romantic comedy and trying, but failing, to capitalize on the stale conventions of both. The slasher part is a misshapen mess, with a dull villain, a brainless plot and a closing reveal that’s mind-bogglingly contrived even by the low standards of this sort of fare, and despite ingratiating leads in Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding, as a romcom it’s more irritatingly exhausting than engaging.
Holt plays Ally, an advertising executive employed by Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins), owner of a Seattle jewelry business. Ally’s been charged with creating a campaign to promote the firm’s products for Valentine’s Day, but what she’s come up with—a series of vignettes about doomed lovers, driven by her recent breakup with longtime boyfriend Collin (Ben Black)—is disastrously unpopular. Ally’s best pal Monica (Gigi Zumbado) tries to buck her up, but her motormouth persona, intended to be a deliciously over-the-top equivalent of the sophisticated chums of old screwball comedies, is as annoying as Watkins’ tart-tongued boss—indeed, it’s difficult to decide which is more irksome, even if both actresses have the verbal dexterity to pull off what’s asked of them; the problem in each case isn’t the velocity of delivery, it’s the absence of wit in what’s being said. (It certainly doesn’t help either of them that in a sequence at a drive-in, we’re shown clips of Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday,” and the comparison is devastating.)
The same criticism is applicable to the romance. Ally meets—very cute, of course—a fellow named Jay (Gooding) at a coffee shop (there’s confusion when they both order the same absurdly complicated concoction, and some slapstick head-bumping results). He, of course, turns out to be the supposed genius Crystal has hired to fix Ally’s campaign, so they’ll have to work together. And by a stroke of misfortune their relationship is construed as love by the malevolent titular maniac who’d offed the influencers in the prologue.
Heart Eyes, as this guy is called (or HEK for short) is a knife-wielding wacko wearing a white mask with heart-shaped eye holes that sometimes glow an ominous red. He’s become a national figure by reason of the slaughter of lovers he engages in every February 14. Having hit Boston and Philadelphia in the previous two years, he’s chosen Seattle for his spree this time around, and Ally and Jay become his primary targets, though he’ll happily terminate anybody who gets in his way. That includes the pair of dimwitted cops, Hobbs and Shaw (Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster—and yes, there will be a lame joke about their names), who will for some unfathomable reason decide that Jay is the killer.
The rest of the movie is a protracted chase that winds up in a church where the villain’s identity is revealed. It turns out to be as complicated a business as the denouements in the increasingly convoluted “Scream” franchise, and equally absurd; but at least those pictures had the excuse of being sequels to sequels, and therefore ridiculous by necessity. There is one comforting script note in the avalanche of gore that follows. Much is made in the opening coffee shop sequence of the fact that Ally carries around a steel straw in her purse for environmental reasons; happily the writers bow to the requirements of Chekov’s gun law regarding it in the final confrontation.
As noted, Holt and Gooding are pleasant leads, though the frenzy with which Josh Ruben directs the action puts them at a disadvantage; Sawa and Brewster overdo things radically as the dumb cops, but that’s what Ruben demands of all the supporting cast. The picture looks okay for this kind of fare, with the production design (Rob Bavin) and costumes (Jaindra Watson) set off by the brightly lit cinematography of Stephen Murphy, who was apparently enthusiastic about doing a sequence set in a garishly appointed amusement park. Editor Brett W. Bachman follows Ruben’s injunction to keep things moving at all costs, and Jay Wadley’s score adds ferociously to the frantic mood.
“Heart Eyes” ends with a seemingly definitive end to the maniac’s career. But you can rest assured that, like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Ghostface, he will rise again, however implausibly, if the box office receipts call for it.