HOLLYWOOD—There hasn’t been many films in the horror genre that tackle the holiday of love. The only ones I can think of is the 1981 flick “My Bloody Valentine” and the 2009 remake of the film, “My Bloody Valentine 3D.” Are either great movies? Not quite, they are your typical slasher flicks with someone wearing a unique mask and weapon killing people one-by-one. That isn’t the case with “Heart Eyes” which has a unique motive and premise. We have a serial killer who targets couples on the most lovey dovey day of the year, Valentine’s Day.
Our killer wears a strange looking mask, that has heart eyes and can utilize night vision to find prey who try to escape. Now, if you’re a lover of violence, this movie gives you all of that and much more, sometimes to the point where you have to turn away because it is indeed a bit excessive and gruesome for my liking, and I’ve seen it all unfortunately. With that said, the movie opens with the classic kill scene, but proves characters are just stupid sometimes.
Like if you see someone get killed who has a gun in their possession, why wouldn’t you grab it? How about not running to a place where there is no escape? “Heart Eyes” falls in that troupe of doing what every other horror movie does and hopes the audience doesn’t catch it. Sorry, but we’re too smart for that nowadays. We know the characters can’t be overly smart because the movie will end before it starts, but let’s not make them overly dumb either.
The strongest selling point for the movie is the performances by Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding as Ally and Jay. Holt and Gooding has some strong chemistry, and you buy them as a couple or even in ‘Heart Eyes’ mind a couple who is a couple, even though they obviously are not. Holt and Gooding bring charm to the characters, and they have fun banter as strangers who get to know each other whilst dealing with something horrific at the same time.
They are both advertising execs working on a campaign for an annoying jewelry designer, who find themselves enthralled in a fight for their lives with a kiss to show-up a former flame, gives our serial killer their next targets. I swear when I say the pacing for this movie moved at a feverish pitch I mean that to the absolute fullest. This might have been the quickest 90-minute movie I can recall watching in years and it’s a great thing. I never got bored, I was invested in our primary characters, and I did find myself intrigued in the notion of finding out precisely what makes are our killer tick or the motive.
Was I disappointed with that reveal of our killer and the motive, absolutely because its believable to some degree, but then again, it felt weak as a viewer, and you can connect the dots with some not so great dialogue.
Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster as cops Hobbs (Sawa) and Shaw (Brewster), yes, a play from “The Fast and the Furious” franchise was a complete joke. Seriously, I would love to watch a horror movie where the cops are not complete idiots. I think I can name two horror movies where that felt like the case, “Halloween” (1978) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984), but I lean on the 1978 classic more because the cops did not do stupid crap, they just believed in a doctor more than trusting their own actual instinct to the detriment of its citizens.
There is a scene in the movie where the killer stumbles upon a ton of lovebirds at a drive-in movie theater and the killer just goes to town. My first thought, there are tons of you, many of you are in cars and you all are scared of one person with a knife. Make that make sense. If you can take yourself out of all the ‘what-ifs’ of the film, “Heart Eyes” just happens to be a fun time. A quick breeze of horror that manages to entertain, is not boring and delivers a unique perspective on a holiday that could have been tweaked just a tinge more to deliver a more satisfying film than just the mediocre.
