Horror films have come a long way in the past fifty or so years. Filmmakers like David Croninberg, John Carpenter, James Wan, and many others have made this genre their own. The genre has even gotten stale at one point. Lately, what I’ve coined as the horror resonance has brought the genre back. Films like Heart Eyes set it back twenty years, though. I don’t want to see another one like this for a while, even though there are a few bad horror films each year. I never get used to them.

The premise of Heart Eyes is that on Valentine’s Day, the past two years”HEK” as he’s popularly named the Heart Eyes Killer, has killed a series of newly married or romantically linked couples in Boston and Philadelphia. After a brutal slaying at a vineyard on the outskirts of Seattle, news outlets have announced that the Heart Eyes Killer has come to the Pacific Northwest. All young couple are scared out of their minds at the thought of this serial killer in their town.

The film mainly focuses on a disgraced advertising agent played by Olivia Holt and the man who has been tasked with helping her save her job, Mason Gooding, and the campaign she botched accidentally. Their banter and inadvertent chemistry has attracted the Heart Eyes Killer. He sees them kiss, and it’s the beginning of the end for these two mistaken lovers. That huge contrivance is just the beginning of the obscure nature of this horror comedy, though.

Some people may say this film is winking at the audience. It’s not meant to be taken very seriously. It’s self-aware of the dumb nature it’s making fun of.  The campy yet cheesy  aspects of this horror film weren’t funny to me. I didn’t laugh once at this film, while others in the theater I was in were laughing. I think they may have been laughing because of the stupidity of this movie. It’s one thing to be a homage to this genre, but it’s another to be completely ridiculous from beginning to end.

This film was just cringeworthy in a bad way. The dialogue is completely absurd from most of the characters, but mainly the stars of the movie. The explanation of the reason why this has been going on in the past and present is one of the most obvious things I’ve seen in years. I was rolling my eyes at how terrible the dialogue was. It didn’t matter who was speaking. Everybody sounded dumb and obnoxious to me. Especially the CEO of the jewelry company the main character worked for. 

Just on a horror level, I could tell there were scream vibes from the very beginning.  Fans of that franchise will probably get a kick out of this comedic satire version of those films. I wasn’t very enamored with it, though. From the cold open to all the various bloody kills using a crossbow and a machete, these gruesome sequences were no pun intended, overkill. The director, Josh Ruben, overdid it with all the crazy kills. I was sick of the blood and guts by the time the movie finally ended.

Heart Eyes wants to be a funnier version of Scream, but it’s not. It’s pretty dumb and ridiculous. I haven’t even mentioned some of the cast, namely Jordana Brewster, from the Fast and Furious Franchise. Who is awful?  The kills were too many and way too much. The self-aware winking at the camera aspects of the story are terribly implemented into the plot. I didn’t need to take this film seriously because it’s not a movie that should be even  considered a serious horror film, satire or not. It’s just a bad movie. No reasoning necessary.

1 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen