Possibly the creepiest holiday ever—how else to describe the honoring of a fat, diaper-clad lad who flies through the air shooting arrows at people?—Valentine’s Day has inspired not one but two slasher films: 1981’s My Bloody Valentine and the just-released Valentine. The earlier film, set in a small town in rural Canada, is actually about something: a community’s collective guilt after a terrible mining accident kills a group of men. Valentine, on the other hand, is all about Denise Richards. More specifically, it’s all about Denise Richards’ need to fire her agent and start getting parts in better movies. She plays Paige, one of four vixens who were partially responsible for the emotional destruction of a geeky kid named Jeremy back in the sixth grade. When the hapless doofus asks Paige to dance at a Valentine’s Day mixer during the film’s Carrie-like prologue, she retorts, “I’d rather be boiled alive” (which, by the way, is not the sort of thing you want to say in a film whose climax features a hot tub and a power drill). Thirteen years after that fateful night, the four girlfriends—Paige, Kate, Dorothy, and Lily—are now working professionals, on the run from a mask-wearing psychopath who sends them maggot-filled chocolates and love notes such as “Roses are red/Violets are blue/They’ll need dental records/To identify you.” Maybe the psycho killer is Jeremy all grown up. Or maybe he’s David Boreanaz (star of the WB’s Angel), who plays—badly—Kate’s boyfriend, Adam, a recovering alcoholic. Whoever the madman is, his nose bleeds every time he slaughters one of the girls. Why? Who knows—or cares, really, because it’s all about Denise Richards. “God, we were so horrible to that kid,” she says, remembering poor li’l Jeremy. It’s the one moment in director Jamie Blanks’ film when someone actually approaches something resembling depth—an impulse immediately undermined when one of Paige’s cohorts snorts back, “Whatever.” Blanks, who bizarrely passed on Charlie’s Angels to direct this imitation of an imitation of a good horror movie, made a capable debut with Urban Legend, which has wit and style and is genuinely scary in places. With the godawful Valentine, however, all he’s done is given audiences another reason to hate that chubby, bow-bearing baby. —Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa