I hadn’t watched this movie before because everything I had seen or read about it made it seem like an entirely forgettable slasher. Turns out, after having finally watched it, I was definitely correct in my initial impression.

The story starts with a junior high Valentine’s Day dance as Jeremy, the bucktoothed nerdy kid, tries to ask the popular girls to dance and gets rejected one after another. That is until he asks Dorothy, a barely overweight girl that the movie tries to say is super fat. They end up making out but when some guys see them and start making fun of them, Dorothy says that Jeremy actually attacked her and forced himself on her. He gets stripped to his underwear and beat up in front of the whole school. Fast forward 14 years later and the girls that he tried to ask to dance are now getting stalked and killed by someone in a cherub mask, just like they had at the dance for some reason.

I’m gonna get into the spoilers for the review because it’s hard to explain just what this movie does well and poorly without getting into it. Also, this isn’t worth watching so spoiling it shouldn’t be a problem. One of the worst things this movie does is try to present itself as a mystery for who the slasher is. I assume mostly because of Scream making every slasher feel like they need to do this. The problem is the movie fully half-asses this by presenting us with one consistent male character and a bunch of barely seen, obvious red herrings that would make no sense as a killer. The ending of “Oh my gosh, it was David Boreanaz all along!” is such a wet fart of a twist since he’s the only character we’ve spent any time with other than the victims. Also, him being the killer makes no sense in movie as we are supposed to believe that Jeremy Melton grew up to be David Boreanaz through the magic of plastic surgery and if that’s what plastic surgery can do, sign my ass up.

The only remotely clever thing the movie does is set up the order and type of kill with the opening dance sequence. Shelley is asked first and is the first to die with the others following in the same order. Kate doesn’t reject him but says “Maybe later” and is the one to survive. Dorothy is last and falsely gets him charged with assault and she is the last to die and also gets dressed like the killer so she gets falsely blamed for the murders. That’s a fun little detail to have in the movie and I appreciate it. The movie is otherwise fairly tame almost bloodless in its kills. One of the red herrings get killed by being beaten with a hot clothes iron and we see none of it or even the body afterward. Also the movie randomly has its most drawn out, tense chase/murder done for some random woman that Jeremy never knew, was in barely one scene earlier, and then also gets the best kill in the film. Why waste the best scene in your movie on someone we don’t know or care about?

This is an easily skippable movie and would only really be worth watching in a series with stuff like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend to have a retrospective on what Scream did to the horror genre for a full decade.

Score: 2.5 out of 5