‘Heart Eyes’ Review: A Been-There-Slashed-That Rom-Com Horror Flick

Ever since the genre was created, the “meet cute” has been a staple of romantic comedies. So it makes sense that in the new “romantic comedy horror film” from director Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within), couples should die cute. Well, not cute exactly, unless you think of spears going through eyeballs or heads being crushed into bloody pulp as cute. Of course, for the target audience of Heart Eyes, that’s exactly what they are. They relish the gruesome deaths, the more graphic the better, the way audiences used to relish spectacular production numbers in musicals.

If movie musicals had their heyday in the 1930s and ‘40s, the equivalent for slasher movies was the 1980s. Like the Scream franchise, which it closely resembles, Heart Eyes both pays homage to and parodies its inspirations, which, considering that it’s set on Valentine’s Day, must include My Bloody Valentine (the 1981 original, of course, not the remake).

The story revolves around an annual murder spree conducted on the holiday in different cities by a killer wearing a mask featuring, you guessed it, heart-shaped eyes. Not only do they send the right anti-social message, they also have a utilitarian value, capable of night vision while glowing red in the dark. The “Heart Eyes Killer,” or “HEK” as the media has dubbed him, only attacks romantic couples, suggesting that things have gone badly for him in the dating department. So pretty much everyone should be considered a suspect.

The central characters in the film, Ally (an appealing Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding), aren’t a romantic couple. At least yet. They’re thrown together when forced by their tyrannical boss (Michaela Watkins, doing a send-up of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada) to collaborate on an ad campaign. After dinner, Ally makes the mistake of passionately kissing Jay after she spots her ex with his new girlfriend. It makes them Heart Eyes’ new target.

The killer proves pretty resourceful, even managing to show up inside Ally’s closet just a few minutes later. In the ensuing battle that spills outside, Ally flees, and when the police arrive, Jay is arrested as a suspect. The detectives investigating the murders, played by Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster, are named Hobbs and Shaw, which is an example of the general level of wit in the screenplay penned by Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, whose collective credits include such horror films as Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife, and Happy Death Day and its sequel.

The creatives’ obvious affinity for the genre comes through in every frame of the film, and to their credit Heart Eyes includes many clever touches, such as the would-be victims declaring “We’re not together!” in a vain effort to dissuade the romance-obsessed killer. And there’s no shortage of inventive carnage on display, enough to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty gore hounds, presented with the sort of practical effects they relish.

But despite the slavish genre trappings, or rather because of them, Heart Eyes feels too familiar to prove very interesting, unless you think that a potential victim throwing up on the killer is a novel twist. It’s no spoiler to reveal that the killer seems to have been definitively dispatched at one point, since it takes place with 30 minutes to go and everyone knows that he’ll soon reappear in one way or another. The method that the screenwriters have devised, in which his identity is revealed, proves both overplotted and underwhelming, although it does provide the opportunity for one of the cast members to vigorously chew the scenery.