Christopher Landon has his heart set on reviving the slasher, and he only has one plan on how to pull that off. In Happy Death Day, Landon combined the slasher with the time-loop Groundhog’s Day comedy, hoping to bring some novelty to a horror template that’s been stale since at least the late 1990s. In Freaky, he combined the slasher with the 80s body-swap comedy, and now, as a producer & writer on the latest slasher-mashup Heart Eyes, he has repeated the gimmick by combining the slasher with the mainstream romcom. All of these novelty mashups have a killer logline premise and a few amusing individual gags, but they’re not doing much to revive the slasher on its own merits. If anything, by comparing & merging the slasher with other genres decades beyond their own respective expiration dates, Landon is making a dispiriting admission that it is an effectively dead medium. It’s like improvising a full meal out of several incongruent, insufficient portions of leftovers before they get tossed out or mold in the fridge. Sure, it’s filling, but it’s also desperate and ultimately unsatisfying.

To be specific, Heart Eyes combines the early 2000s third-wave slasher with the 2010s straight-to-Netflix romcom, inadvertently calling attention to how long both genres have been culturally dormant (and how dire of a state they were in when they were most recently relevant). The romcom plot at its center is purposefully tropey as a They Came Together-style parody of the genre, complete with verbal references to decades-old relics like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Olivia Holt (doing her best Kate Hudson) stars as an over-worked, under-compensated marketing professional whose latest, failed ad campaign has put her job in jeopardy. Mason Gooding (doing his best Ryan Phillippe) co-stars as the hotshot ad agency hunk who’s threatening to take over her job but, wouldn’t you know it, they end up falling for each other despite the professional conflict. Of course, this swooning reverie is broken when a masked maniac who only kills lovers—only on Valentine’s Day—interrupts their meet cute with meaty cuts, hunting the unlikely couple during their first after-hours business meeting together while they desperately insist that it is not a date.

If there’s any thematic justification for this clunky genre mashup, it’s based in a cynicism against modern romance, as annually escalated by the cultural Valentine’s Day ritual. Heart Eyes ties its slasher-romance premise to a longer violent-romantic literary tradition, citing Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde, and Jack & Rose as iconic couples who meet a violent end in their respective stories. In practice, though, its only real commentary on the nature of romance is mired in current, derisive assessments of love in the internet age, as typified by social media envy, dating apps, incels, kinks, throuples, etc. It’s a rallying cry for anyone frustrated with the state of modern romance, offering ironic, gory counterprogramming for people who groan at the very mention of Valentine’s Day, an emblem of a great societal failure. Thankfully, the mascot of that counterprogramming is at least well designed: a leather-hooded figure with glowing hearts for eyes and a full arsenal of deadly weapons, including some Cupid arrows for the sake of holiday-specific branding. The reveal of that mysterious killer’s identity is a bit of a letdown, but the mask is memorably distinct and the kills are memorably brutal, which is more than most rote slashers deliver.

Speaking of romantic traditions, the Valentine’s Day slasher is a subgenre with its own history of unrated gems, namely Valentine & My Bloody Valentine. If Heart Eyes has a permanent place in the greater horror canon, it’s as a novelty to be watched on that specific holiday, the way dedicated horror nerds plan their calendar around titles like April Fool’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil. That seasonal context is much more forgiving to its charms than the context of Christopher Landon’s career project of saving the slasher through an ongoing series of genre mashups. As a blending of the slasher and the romcom, Heart Eyes feels disappointingly out of date and insincere, especially when compared to more conceptually thorough mashups like last year’s slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature. So much of the modern slasher’s current state is defined by nostalgia for past successes, with recent revivals of Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Slumber Party Massacre being typical examples (along with broader pastiches like Ti West’s X trilogy). Tying that revival to other long-stale genres like the romcom and the body-swap comedy doesn’t exactly imply progress or innovation; it’s a lateral move at best.

-Brandon Ledet