My Bloody Valentine (1981): C

My Bloody Valentine opens promisingly, with a sexy blonde (sporting a red heart tattoo above her breast) sensually stroking the tube on a miner’s gas mask mere moments before the gentleman hacks her to pieces. After this instance of perverted pre-coital murder, however, George Mihalka’s slasher film quickly devolves into a piece of hackwork, aping Halloween with every POV shot from its seemingly indestructible killer. A group of rowdy young mine workers (including two doofuses fighting over the same bland woman) and their ditzy girlfriends become axe fodder for a deranged lunatic named Harry Warden who wears a sinister gas mask and holds a grudge against his hometown and its Valentine’s Day festivities. That said celebrations include little more than a dance attended by 15 drunken idiots doesn’t diminish the fiend’s bloodlust, who offs his prey without an ounce of inventiveness and then sends his victims’ hearts – along with ridiculous “roses are red, violets are blue”-style notes – to the wholly ineffective local mayor and police chief. In the end, the only sweet thing about the surprisingly bloodless film (which was heavily slashed of gore at the MPAA’s urging) is the crazy old bartending coot who, like a latter-day Nostradamus, barks dire warnings about death and dismemberment to the town’s young punks.