Very Early in Valentine we’re faced with an impeccably awfully overacted performance from one of the actors which immediately is overlaid by the name of whoever did the casting for the film. And you wonder then why anyone would own up to having cast that particular performer.

But then for a while you give the film the benefit of the doubt and try to just enjoy what might be a movie meant to be a spoof of slasher films, in the tradition of the Scream films for example.

But soon it becomes apparent that Valentine isn’t consciously a spoof at all. It won’t manage to do more than make you jump every now and then, only between a long inward groans. Because Valentine is a film to endure not enjoy.

Perhaps Valentine is fundamentally a victim of its casting. A bevy of the young and the beautiful are the victims for this particular killer and they seem to again and again take the time to present themselves carefully before they speak, like vain cats displaying themselves on mantelpieces before they meow.

The plot won’t challenge anyone. A young boy is demeaned viciously at a high school dance by a succession of girls. Skip some years. The same young women are being killed one by one by a masked murderer.

A ridiculous detective gets on the case but the women have pretty much forgotten the dance scene and are in any case far too self absorbed to raise much in the way of sympathy when the knives start to flash. Serial killers have a big problem - what to do with the bodies.

There’s a memorable scene in a teaching hospital morgue, a venue which provides great opportunities for corpse disposal, on weekends in any case I suppose, before the embalmers arrive on Monday morning for work.

But Valentine did need, still, to reconsider the question of bodies laying about. But then with these ladies continually preening, amidst the awful acting, what’s a few loose corpses?

One Dead Fly