my bloody valentine [1981]

i've not been a fan of early '80s slasher films. i watched them with a feeling of dread at their puritanical views of sex, only sexually active teens got butchered, which are mired by the sensational aspect of gore for the sake of gore. slasher pics are much like the contemporary torture porn swing in today's horror films, they seem so manufactured at eliciting nausea from their audiences and thus are so fake to be at all believable.

but then so is the manufactured holiday of valentine's day. not that i hate valentine's day. i don't at all. only that the date of february 14 was plucked by greeting card manufacturers as a way to sell more of their products. so it is no surprise that an artificial construct, the slasher film, meets an equally artificial holiday, valentine's day.

well, the movie is awful. it has generated a life of its own as a figure of veneration among varied members of the horror movie audience. for better and for worse. i've only seen it once and was simply whelmed in its plot device of a spurned lover taking the guise of a miner killing off sexually active teens one by one and who appears only once a year on the day of, yeah, you guessed it, valentine's day. valentine's day is the appropriate setting for the killings.

so then, here we are. grab your honey, get a bowl of popcorn, turn down the lights, and get a very red, bloody looking, bottle of wine and watch this flick. happy valentine's day.