First off -- David is the psycho killer okay? There. Now you don't have to go.
Valentine's day has nothing to do with the killer's motivation. Dweeby little kid is humiliated and framed at a school dance and sent to reform school, comes back years later to kill all the girls who refused to dance with him at the prom. Why he bothers to wait until Valentine's day to start harassing them is never
explained.
This is an incredibly sloppy production. The opening murder occurs when a med student decides to work off a bad date with a creepy character who is
introduced, runs on and on and on, and then disappears, having nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. She decides to get over this by dissecting her shrunken, blue-grey cadaver in the middle of the nite. There is the obligatory noise off, she goes to investigate and has the shit scared out of her by another character who has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, and returns to her shrunken blue cadaver, which is still shurnken and blue. Then, in the next shot, in an interval in which she has walked all of three feet, the shrunken blue cadaver has become the buff and pink David, who has cunningly hidden the carcass in a closet ACROSS THE ROOM, and who jumps up and kills her. You could put it down as an editing and continuity error, except for the fact that the scene can't
work WITHOUT the mistake...
There has to be a dramatic look for the killer of course. In this case, he is always first seen in dramatically flickering light from a fluorescent light. But it's not just the same lighting effect, it's THE SAME LIGHTING FIXTURE. Shot to shot, room to room, building to building, as the psycho killer apparently wanders across town carrying this fluorescent light everywhere he goes and wiring it into each locale where he's going to commit a felony.
Most of the killings are committed with the traditional butcher knife, except for one at a trendy video art exhibit, where the killer just happens to have picked up a hunting longbow and set of broadhead arrows.
The clueless cop (there has to be a clueless cop) is interviewing the surviving friends of the first two victims and one they haven't found yet. All of the surviving women have received threatening cards and gifts from the killer, so of course the cop tells them all to go home and not worry about the suspect the cops have lost track of.
At the big party (of course) where the killer is going to bump off his last victims, all the surviving girls make a point of wandering away from the crowd into isolated spaces. One gets the feeling that if they hadn't, the four "screenwriters" were prepared to rush out on the set and drag them.
As David goes about killing his last victims the first plucky little dear hauls off and cracks him right in the face with a pool cue. He drops like a sack of spuds. Does our plucky little dear then run back to the crowded party with all the bouncers in their big black SECURITY T-shirts, screaming her lungs out?
Of course not. She runs off into an even more secluded part of the mansion, where David of course finds her. He then takes off his killer mask and goes back to the party with not a mark on his face from the pool cue. He then terrorizes his next victim, who belts him upside the head with a full magnum of champagne. He drops like a sack of spuds. Does our plucky little dear then run back to the crowded party with all the bouncers in their big black SECURITY T-shirts, screaming her lungs out? Of course not. She runs off into an even more secluded part of the mansion, where David of course finds her. And when we see David again... not a
mark on him...
