Marketed as a horror romantic-comedy, Heart Eyes is meta-snark wrapped in a holiday-horror package, though it gets points for smoothly weaving together allusions to vintage slasher movie and rom-com tropes with a Valentine’s Day fillip. It’s not “funny, ha-ha” — it’s “cool, I get the joke, heh-heh” and was probably fun to write, especially since the basic plot is, well, basic.
Which is not a criticism because slasher movies are built to formula: 1) Contained location (isolated house/summer camp/woods/creepy hotel et al.). 2) Limited number of characters, the better to lower the chances of the survivors of each cull. 3) Poor cell reception. Once upon a time it was easy to just to cut the phone line and isolate the victim pool, but now writers have to up their game to explain why no one just calls the freakin’ cops the minute the first scary message / puddle of blood / mutilated corpse is discovered.
Or in this case, the crushed and gooey remains of a corpse. I’ll give it to Heart Eyes for charging right out of the gate and not mincing, um, words.
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