{"id":11088,"date":"2025-02-07T20:55:22","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T01:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=11088"},"modified":"2025-03-09T18:58:44","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T22:58:44","slug":"heart-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/02\/07\/heart-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Heart Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Heart Eyes<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Horror-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 97 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong violence and gore, language, some sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Josh Ruben\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jay Wadley\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Stephen Murphy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: February 7, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, Devon Sawa, Jordana Brewster, Latham Gaines, Chris Parker, Ben Black.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0Two movies are vying for top honors this weekend, the action rom-com Love Hurts and the slasher rom-com Heart Eyes<\/strong>. So which one is the better date movie? I\u2019d say Heart Eyes<\/strong> has the edge. It\u2019s romantic comedy with a body count. How do you top that?<\/p>\n

\u00a0The killer in Heart Eyes<\/strong> is a psycho who appears on Valentine\u2019s Day and kills couples. Every year, he shows up in a different city and plies his craft before going quiet for the next 364 days. He hides his identity with a leather mask with heart-shaped eyeholes that glow red. When he kills, it\u2019s a mess. He dispatches some of his victims with arrows (as in Cupid). This year, he\u2019s in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Pitch designer Ally (Holt, Cruel Summer) finds herself in deep, hot water after an ill-timed commercial for a high-end jewelry company featuring doomed lovers (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, Bonnie and Clyde) creates mass controversy on-line. In order to keep her job, she\u2019s ordered to work with a freelancer on a new campaign. The freelancer in question is Jay (Gooding, Scream V and VI), the same fellow she had a meet-cute with at a coffee shop that morning. They have differing opinions about love and romance. He\u2019s a romantic who believes in the power of love. She\u2019s thinks it\u2019s all a sham. She\u2019s been burnt too many times. A set-up like this just screams romance, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

\u00a0An ill-timed kiss puts the not-couple in the crosshairs of the Heart Eyes Killer dubbed \u201cHEK\u201d by the police and press. Ally plants one of Jay outside a restaurant when she sees her ex with his new girlfriend. HEK sees it and starts stalking them. It\u2019s a night of terror and romance as the pair fights off the killer and their obvious feelings for each other. At one point, Jay finds himself accused of being HEK by the two detectives on the case, Hobbs (Sawa, Final Destination) and Shaw (Brewster, The Fast and the Furious). Yes, the joke is acknowledged to humorous effect.<\/p>\n

\u00a0My favorite Valentine\u2019s Day slasher is the original 1981 My Bloody Valentine (uncut version, of course). It still is. You can\u2019t beat Harry Warden and his infamous candy boxes (pray you never receive one). Heart Eyes<\/strong> comes pretty damn close. Even though it\u2019s CGI, it has some great kills. I can\u2019t decide which one\u2019s my favorite, the victim crushed in the wine press or the slow, graphic decapitation. They\u2019re both messy and cool. There are other good ones. Somebody is impaled and lifted off the ground with a flagpole. A male victim gets a machete between the legs. A man and woman are killed simultaneously with a tire iron during sex in the back of a van. He gets it through the mouth then her head is pushed down on the protruding implement. Yeah, this one\u2019s a bloodbath alright, but it\u2019s tempered nicely by the love story at the center of the carnage.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Who would have ever thought that two genres as fundamentally different as slasher and rom-com could form a near-perfect union? Director Josh Ruben (Werewolves Within) crushes it more or less. It\u2019s not perfect. Ally\u2019s boss, played to great comic exaggeration by Michaela Watkins (Enough Said), feels somewhat out of place. It\u2019s almost like she\u2019s making a different movie. A few other small parts aren\u2019t a neat fit, but the intelligent and surprisingly insightful screenplay more than make up for the minor flaws. I like how the writers take jabs at both sides of the equation. Valentine\u2019s Day is the most polarizing of holidays, people either love it or hate it. Some embrace all the corny clich\u00e9s; others dismiss it as a creation of greeting card companies looking to boost sales. The writers, which include Christopher Landon of the Happy Death Day movies, have a great handle on the debate and Ruben presents it with a knowing wink and smile.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Unlike Ke Huy Quan and Ariana DeBose in the tepid action rom-com Love Hurts, Holt and Gooding have chemistry. It\u2019s not the greatest pairing in cinema history, but it doesn\u2019t feel like the two actors were thrown together at random either. Holt is convincing as cynical Ally who claims she\u2019s over her ex while stalking him on social media. Gooding turns on the charm as Jay, the kind of \u201cMr. Perfect\u201d every girl except Ally dreams of meeting. Gigi Zumbado (The Rookie) makes for great comic relief as Ally\u2019s bff Monica, a woman totally into having a sugar daddy to pay for everything like impromptu shopping montages. Sawa and Brewster are good as the alt-Hobbs & Shaw. They work well off each other.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If you\u2019re looking for a fun date movie this Valentine\u2019s Day, look no further than Heart Eyes<\/strong>. It\u2019s a lot of fun. It takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to both genres even showing different kinds of couples. The opening scene depicts a proposal at a vineyard that turns out to be one of those staged deals that end up on Instagram. The couple is so annoyingly vapid that you\u2019ll be cheering HEK on when he finally shows up on the scene. It\u2019s touches like this that make Heart Eyes<\/strong> so enjoyable. See it with someone you love. Happy Valentine\u2019s Day!\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heart Eyes (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Horror-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 97 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong violence and gore, language, some sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Josh Ruben\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jay Wadley\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Stephen Murphy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: February 7, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Gigi Zumbado, Michaela Watkins, Devon Sawa, Jordana Brewster, Latham […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11093,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Heart-Eyes-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11088"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11401,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088\/revisions\/11401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}