I like to focus on the positive in things, and that leads me to praise both Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding. They are the talented, entertaining, and highly charismatic leads of new horror-comedy Heart Eyes. I hope to see each of them soon in something actually worthy of their abilities; Heart Eyes simply does not cut it.

The film follows ex-medical student turned marketer Ally (Holt), who is forced to work with incoming colleague Jay (Gooding) on a new jewellery campaign on Valentine’s Day. Their encounter, during which opposites inevitably attract, results in them being targeted for a brutal murder at the hands of Heart Eyes – a masked serial killer who is brutally slaying couples every February 14th.

Heart Eyes is directed by Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within) and written by Phillip Murphy, Michael Kennedy, and Christopher Landon – whose previous credit as writer and director of Happy Death Day (2017) ably demonstrates an ability to balance horror and comedy in a film. Whatever happened this time, the results were very different. This is a terrible movie, and you are likely better off skipping it.

Rather than open as a romantic comedy and then veer unexpectedly into horror, Heart Eyes begins with a gory and violent prologue before temporarily shifting into comedy, and makes the audience wait quite a while before it inevitably turns violent again. The violence is often garish and tacky. The comedy is generally predictable and ordinary. Rather than use one genre to boost and invigorate the other, Heart Eyes runs in multiple genre directions at the same time and fails at all of them. The result is a horror film that is not scary, mashed up with a comedy that is not funny. Particularly off-putting is the way in which the film’s screenplay sabotages its own jokes: a running bit about Jay and Ally being hunted by an anti-couples killer when they aren’t actually a couple could be amusing, except the film actively builds romance between them at the same time.

A lot of the film feels quite reminiscent of horror franchise Scream, albeit not any of the good instalments. It lacks the proper self-awareness for one thing. For another, even Scream could solidly make its audience jump a few times. Nothing here is shocking or unexpected at all: not the violence, nor the jokes, and certainly not the identity of the Heart Eyes killer.

Suppporting characters are each a combination of weakly written dialogue and performances too formulaic to compensate. Actors including Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster simply fail to convince at all, as if no one working in the film has their heart in it at all.

There is potential in some of the film’s concepts, and as noted above its two lead actors do a lot to alleviate the most egregious scenes. The execution, however, is an embarrassment. It is not that it is trashy cinema; it’s that it is done so very, very badly.