First Impressions On Heart Eyes (2025)

 

By Joe Gibson

 

I am aware that 8 months after release is a little late for some “First Impressions”, but, as it is the Halloween season, I am not exactly sure I want to go through the effort of a more in depth close-read review when I could otherwise watch a lot more horror films this month (and select for review from there). And that’s really it. I don’t want to call this a review for pedantic reasons, but I still want to share my thoughts on the film. 

 

Opening in theaters February 7th of 2025, a movie equal parts romantic comedy and slasher film would have been an ideal date night scenario (for whatever reason, it underperformed with couples and did not exactly break-even), but I did not elect to see it at that time. Actually, looking over the early to mid-2025 film releases, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even go to the theater until July this year. In any case, I was excited to watch Heart Eyes. I liked Mason Gooding from his role in the Scream movies, and, back when I was in the target audience, I enjoyed I Didn’t Do It, a Disney Channel show starring Olivia Holt (the other lead of this film). I liked that show because I was a dumb kid, but for what it is worth, I Didn’t Do It was the closest thing Disney Channel had to complex metatextual storytelling in those days because each episode started in medias res and then filled in the context with semi reliable narrators, ending with a plot twist.

 

The film features Christopher Landon as producer with a writing credit, but Josh Ruben directed the movie. Landon is behind a lot of recent slasher hits and almost directed Scream 7, but Josh Ruben seems to be a lot less accomplished. Still, he also directed Werewolves Within, a film that I have not seen yet but have been wanting to for a little while and will eventually get to. Philip Murphy and Michael Kennedy also possess writing credits on this film, and the latter is a frequent collaborator of Landon’s.

 

Olivia Holt plays the main character of this movie, but the end credits use the same billing trick as the television show Bones, having Mason Gooding, the male love interest, to the right and above her name, with hers at the bottom left. (That way, if you read left to right or up to down, they're both first billing and whatever.) But yeah this is a romantic comedy slasher horror movie relying on meshing the disparate elements and also shared tropes into a cohesive product, a challenge to be sure but not an insurmountable one. It wears this inspiration on its chest when it has the romantic comedy beats positioned in between slasher bits where there is the opening kill and then a meet cute or intimate confession of backstory between the leads and then back to slashing and then seemingly defeating the slasher right into chasing down the lover at the airport. A character even refers to the main relationship in this story as "crazy stupid love, actually” within a monologue listing off the names of other romcoms, so the meta references popularized by Scream remain intact.

 

 

Heart Eyes or The Heart Eyes Killer (HEK) wears some kind of leather mask that reminds me of Jason Voorhees' mask even though that was a hockey mask (I think the resemblance for me comes from the brow crease on HEK’s mask or, looking at it now, maybe just the nose bump). Notably, the mask has red night vision Heart Eyes, hence the name. Heart Eyes hunts lovers on Valentine's Day in a different city every time, employing the use of hunting knives, throwing knives and a crossbow to knock out their intended prey and whoever gets in their way. Consequently, the movie has a high kill count, but the heroes also survive really long against a person who can shoot a crossbow very precisely. (It is not impossible to make it work, but I appreciate the comparative restraint of Scream where Ghostface usually only gets a gun in the third act to raise the stakes or in Scream VI where he gets it for one tense scene and then the third act.) 

There are some genuinely interesting shots (shifting perspective and focus mid action scene or using Heart Eye’s vision gimmick in certain scenes), and the director does a good job at eliciting actor performances to serve the tonal balance of absolute contrived romantic sap and tense slasher storytelling. Notably, compared to his Scream character, Mason Gooding is a lot more vulnerable to taking damage in realistic ways here.

 

I was kind of able to figure out the twist in this movie, and part of this blog post will go over my thought process and the clues or red herrings I noticed on a first pass. However, this was difficult because, as I realized watching this, I understand now at least some of the tropes and shortcuts Scream will use in its mysteries but not for other derivative franchises. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film caught me off guard for not committing to the same type of killer reveal as Scream, and based on the spoilers I have for the film Thanksgiving, it is also possible for these films to just have a solution that does not add up logically (unless the sequels start retconning accomplices like the Saw films). So I did not know going in to err on the side of Scream or IKWYDLS or even Thanksgiving. I will say though, as a hint for any Scream movies if you want to guess them, across all 6 mainline installments, the most surefire method for that is ignoring whatever red herrings the film throws at you and just doing a head count of who is accounted for during every scene.

 

I found it very interesting how, during the opening scene, Heart Eyes killed the couple in a way that inverted the genital symbolism. In art but especially slasher art, penetrative killings are leveraged as phallic imagery, and, as the majority of slasher villains are men but slasher heroes are women, it becomes a way to explore brutal and visceral power dynamics often through knives or machetes or blade hands, all of which penetrate to kill. Heart Eyes uses their blades and arrows to kill the three men in the opening scene. But when the final girl of the opening escapes them by crawling into a wet cylinder, the walls close in on her, crushing her to death. (Incidentally, that cylinder was an industrial wine press.) That is already pretty blatant yonic imagery, but then the red water starts gushing out of vents or holes in the bottom of the machinery, putting a menstrual spin on the death. I have not seen as many slasher films as I would like to, but this seems atypical to me. 

Anyway, when the main detectives stumble upon this crime scene, the dialogue of this murder mystery also frames each of them as suspects but in the reverse way I would expect. The man says “it was probably my incel archetype that did this,” and the woman says “but what if it was a woman like me,” which is really weird because most films would just have them accuse the other person to get this point across efficiently.

 

It is ironic that the film underperformed because one of the romcom elements framing this whole thing is that both of the leads work in marketing for a jewelry company, and Olivia Holt’s character Ally made an advertisement mixing romance with death that bombed and pretty much cost her  job. Life imitating art imitating life, and all that. Through that introduction, the film does weave a compelling story for the heroine with a through line about her fears of intimacy and blood contrasted against her love interest, Mason Gooding’s Jay, who, true to the romcom genre is a bizarre mix of red and green flags because he is clearly analyzing her in every scene and very active in pursuing her (also incidentally a freelancer that was on site for each of Heart Eye’s previous sprees) but also very chivalrous and charismatic.

 

Alright so yeah, in a way that kind of tests your patience in a similar way to IKWYDLS, one of the main cogent suspects for the killer is the love interest (this is Jay, like Ray in IKWYDLS). Jay is not ultimately the killer, and I do not feel bad spoiling that because neither the trailer nor the film felt like pretending he could be. Of the rest of the cast, Ally has a friend named Monica who has a mysterious boyfriend Ally has not met, and Ally’s boss is a Kentucky Fried Tulsi Gabbard looking character with a horde of other employees, and there are five notable characters within a police department as well as Ally’s ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend who have ties to the opening kill victims. 

 

 

Going in, there were a few characters I exonerated for having their motives or introductions revealed too late to be cathartic, and actually I was kind of sort of wrong about one of those (but the strategy overall helped me sift through the red herrings and side characters). The motive is part of the reveal though, so more than that, it was about means and opportunity, and hilariously, though this movie has multiple killers, one of my suspects based on availability still ended up being one of them. (The utility behind having multiple killers is clearing guilty suspects and then prompting fan discussion on which one was in the mask during ambiguous scenes; it is really funny to me that not only could the character that ended up being Heart Eyes have done it alone, but dialogue also tells us exactly who did each scene.)

 

Though the ultimate killer reveal helped some staging inconsistencies (it strains credibility that Heart Eyes could have teleported into Ally’s closet unless there were at least two and one of them had the resources to find out her address quickly), it also creates a contrivance in how a wedding band that has the killer’s initials is important to the investigation into the only other character with those initials (Jay). The killers even reveal that they did not intentionally target Jay from the outset though as turns out to be lucky for them, he was in the same city as each of their previous sprees. Also, pending a rewatch to see if there was better foreshadowing, the film just kind of lies to us about the killers’ motivations until the end, making the motive almost unpredictable. (Obviously, you cannot give away the motive that early one, but the mystery genre is basically just literary Deconstruction in action, and for that to work, there has to be a misspeak in the text that points you to reversing your assumptions about the innocent/guilty binaries in the story, however subtle it is.)

 

I would recommend the movie all in all. Though it is not cleverer or more inspiring than the original Scream, this is a good movie, and it is good in both of the desired genres (which already makes it a better slasher than Scream 3). My main issues with it come from the logistical issues of some plot beats, but those exist in the base genres as well, so making the movie adhere to logic actually risks disrupting those tones. 

 

If I ever actually re-view this movie through an analytical lens, the yonic vs phallic nature of those opening scene deaths would be a good start (in which case I’d probably have to use Freud…who would actually enjoy the part of the movie where one pathetic character calls their lover mommy). I will say though that the film bookends the opening scene in the mid credits scene. In both circumstances, one far off character films two others in a wedding proposal (though I would not call this exactly sequel baiting). Despite some very inventive kills, the gore is rather tame COMPARED to other slasher movies. There is a fair bit of blood shown from minor injuries for realism but also to tie into Ally’s arc. It is rated R and so has the obligatory amount of F bombs. I have no idea if this film will get a sequel, but watch it if you like slashers or romcoms or if you hate both and have a morbidly romantic curiosity.

 

SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM – Death and destruction, one zombie at a time

Editor's note: Doug Gibson, Plan9Crunch co-blogger speaking, today we have another fascinating essay from Sherman Hirsh, screenwriter of Surgikill and Lords of Magick as well as director of Love Slaves of the She Mummy (also here) and the new Scream, Zombie, Scream. As the previous, well-read blog entries show, Sherman describes, with affection and detail, the world of low- and micro-budget filmmaking. His love for film and writing is evident in his essays, and we're proud to offer this inside-look at the making of "Scream, Zombie, Scream." I've watched the film and it's a lean, witty tale that provides a new twist on the zombie genre. When it's ready for sale via amazon, etc., we'll provide a link. Thanks, Sherman.

By Sherman Hirsh

Where do movies come from?  For some filmmakers, it’s a desire to make a pot full of money, achieve fame and meet girls.  For others, it’s an act of homage to the classic movies of the past.  For the rest, like me, it’s just the love of making movies.  Writing a script is putting a daydream on paper.   Shooting is the process of drawing that daydream into the realm of reality.  Seeing that dream play out for a flesh and blood audience is, well, when it happens to you, you’ll understand.

So, where did SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM come from?  I had just put out LOVE SLAVES OF THE  SHE-MUMMY, was itching to make another movie.  While I didn’t really want to make another living dead movie, I had to face the fact that I was going to make a movie without recognizable Stars.  However, in the world of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, the plot is the star.  If I wanted to make a movie a lot of people wanted to see, I had to go with the flow.  Sci-Fi and Fantasy require special props and costumes, and price themselves out of the micro-budget class.  That leaves Horror, but I had no interest in the current trend of torture and psychotic puppets. That left the monster genre.   I couldn’t bring myself to get involved with sexy teenage vampires and angst ridden werewolf kids. 

We live in the Age of Recycling. We recycle, repurpose and reuse anything we can, including ideas.  We claim to love originality and creativity, but actually, we ultimately always return to the tried and true.  As a Mass Communications major, I was taught that nothing can ever be more than 15% new.  So, if one is careful and analytical, one can detect several element of SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM as having established origins, but what’s the fun in that?  So what if I took a pinch of Jekyll and Hyde, a touch of Frankenstein, a little Orwell and some Romero?  It’s a Zombie movie, not a serious statement on the Human condition.  Or is it?

Anyway, bowing to convention and hoping to ride the current wave of interest in zombies, I would concoct a tale of ravaging undead. But I had a problem.  Most zombie movies involve an army of zombies terrorizing and devouring an entire community.  That wasn’t going to happen on my budget.  So, how do I tell a worthwhile story using only one zombie a time?  Well, I would have to build a new kind of Zombie.

However, I was also conscious of just how many zombie movies there are, and I was reluctant to commit to what I feared was an exhausted genre.  As it turns out, it was and is not, but I still had to put my own spin on it.  There are two kinds of zombies.  In my classification system, the real Voodoo zombies, who are victims of ritual drugging and brainwashing, constitute Type 1.  They are living people who think they are dead.  There hasn’t been a voodoo zombie movie in ages.  Type 2 zombies are the typical walking corpses, who escape from their graves to attack the Living.  I needed a new species of zombie, one created by science for the selfish purposes of the scientist.  Which purposes?  Why, to rule the world.  What other reason is there?

A successful movie needs a memorable title.  I went through several until I settled on SCREAM, ZOMBIE SCREAM.  I wanted “zombie” in the title, but I also knew that I needed to imply action, so I needed a good action verb in the title, too.  However, I refused to do another “ATTACK OF THE …” anything.  Screaming is associated with madness, and I had the line about how you had to have a soul to scream, so SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM seemed like a good original choice.  Then I remembered SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM, and SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN.  Too late.

A brilliant bi-polar renegade has the power to turn living people into vicious zombies.  OK, nothing new there, but what if he could turn you back afterward?  Consider the possibilities.  We pick up the story with our loony, who has the temerity to call himself “Orpheus”, reveling in the sight of the President of the United States gutting a scientist on live TV.  The response to this by the Nation is to have a ruthless federal agent break his former partner, who had gone crazy fighting zombies,  out of a high security psychiatric facility and set him and a very cute but dangerous female assistant, on a variety of zombies.  We got our zombie Holocaust, just one zombie at a time.

To accomplish this film, I decided to shoot the whole movie using Green Screen chroma key, a system most people have come to know as enabling the filmmaker to put his subject into any image as a background.  All I needed was the actors and a few pieces of furniture and I could turn any room into anyplace imaginable.  Except that it paralyzes the camera.  If you move the camera, the subject moves but the background remains stationary, giving the whole scene a sloppy, amateurish appearance.  So, all my shots had to be made, locked down, from the same place.  Never again!

I rented a vacant one-room apartment in the North Hollywood building where I lived and set up my studio there.  The large living room became my sound stage.  The kitchen became the makeup room, and the bath room became very hard to get into at times.   We shot over ten weekends, April through June of 2010, and got very good shots, some of which were unusable due to street noise and the fact that we were shooting under the final approach to Burbank airport.

You need two elements to make a film, Time and Money.  The Micro-budget realm seeks to transcend this by shooting for pocket change whenever the cast and crew can get it together.  So, how much did SCREAM, ZOMBIE, SCREAM cost?  To tell you the truth, I didn’t keep track.  I worked without a budget, just spending whatever I needed to. The actors got $50 a day, the studio cost $700 a month, the makeup artist got $200 a day, I spent several hundred dollars on props and costumes and thousands on equipment I intended to use again. The finances on this project are a convoluted mess, but I didn’t do it for money.  I can’t tell you how much the film cost. I never expected it to make any money, so I never expected to have to account for any.  If I had to give an estimate, I’d probably guess something in the $10 – $15,000 range. I had been saving up for it for a couple years and I knew I had enough to finish.  I even have some cash left over for the next one.

Having little in the way of production values, the actors had to work hard to sell what I always recognized as a truly preposterous concept.  I deliberately wrote the script to be short, since I knew it would get stupid if I let it run too long.  I was constantly coaching the actors to put a lot of energy and personality into the portrayals. Sometimes they listened and sometimes they just puttered along.  Usually, the inconsistencies in the acting were due to the lack of rehearsal time we could use.  Also, I cheated and had several of the actors play more than one role.  This dilutes their concentration.

A few of the actors were exceptional.  Devai Pearce, who originally auditioned for the part of “Jo Ann”, Orpheus’ pregnant zombie girlfriend, ended up playing 4 parts, as well as functioning as assistant director, talent coordinator, mic boom operator, cue card writer, and anything else I had to throw at her. 

There could not have been a better choice than William Reinbold, who played Orpheus. He had to undergo violent mood swings and did so skillfully.

Andy Mullins as the Shock Jock did a fabulous job.  This was a particularly important part to me, since I had at one time been a radio talk show host and had modeled the character,” Gary Z”, after a real talk show host, the late Gary Dee, with whom I had worked in Cleveland.  He was incredible.  He makes Howard Stern look like an amateur.   Andy’s zombie ate Wayne Hellstrom as the TV interviewer. Andy also hosts a celebrity show as” Red Karpett”.

The venal televangelist, “Rev. JE$$ Ble$$”, was ably played by Gregg Stickeler, a full-time business professional who finds time to be semi-professional actor.  He is a filmmaker in his own right and was the star of my previous feature LOVE SLAVES OF THE SHE-MUMMY.  His character is a TV preacher who is so phony, he wrote his own bible. He is a parody of all those “God-wants-your-money” hucksters who pollute the airwaves.  This was a touchy part to write, since I had to avoid all reference to any real religious values and symbols.  Gregg had to read the absurd gibberish I wrote as if it really were the Gospel

Supporting players Marco Tazioli and Galen Sato played two roles each as did Andy Mullins.  The exquisitely beautiful and talented Branca Ferrazo was cast sight unseen over the phone when the actress who had originally committed to the role de-committed. She played a starlet named “Brittany Normandie” opposite Bouvier’s ”Dawn Rivers” and a news anchor who gets zombie-beat while reading the news with Michael Swinehart.  Sometimes you just get lucky.

I also got lucky with Maria Olsen, a tremendously talented and enthusiastic performer.  She is well known in the independent film community as someone who will act for anyone if she likes the project.  She is a professional character actress who also generously helps promote the work of others.  If you saw PERCY JACKSON AND THE LIGHTING THEIF, you will recognize her as the teacher/fury.

The real stars of the movie were Tony Gracia and Raeshia Oli as the two dedicated zombie stompers. Our villain was not Orpheus, who is really the Problem. The real heavy is “Agent Schmeterling”, the nasty G man who makes more trouble for the heroes than the nut job.  Albert Marrero Jr. bullied his way magnificently through the part.  Even Bouvier, the star of Andy Milligan’s SURGIKILL, for which I wrote the original script, makes a guest star appearance as the secret ruler of the world.  She appears as “Dawn Rivers”, her stage name in Andy’s last personal film, MONSTROSITY.

A pregnant Zombie needs a lullaby.  I wrote one.  You can hear The Zombie Lullaby in a video I made on YouTube.  I was able to get it recorded at a professional recording studio owned by a friend of Devai, Theo Mordey. He recorded Devai singing her own tune, and processed it so she would harmonize with herself. It was not a part of the original script but it came out so creepy that I used it as background music for a couple of Devai’s scenes.

I wanted to see if I could find rhymes for ZOMBIE.  I remember a cartoon series in the ‘60’s called Milton the Monster.  It had a character named Abecrombie the Zombie. That was the only known rhyme for zombie, for a long time.   I was only able to find two more. Taking the part “–ombie”, I went down the alphabet shopping for rhymes.  A-ombie, no.  B-ombie, OK,  BOMB BE.  Hence the lyric, “Though every gun and bomb be aimed to shatter your sweet head…” c,d,e,f,g, all the way to M.  M-ombie  “ ..will I your loving Mom be..” etc.   After M, nothing. 

We plowed through the shooting and I embarked on the task of editing the final film.  So, why is it just coming out now?  How many excuses can you stand?  3 times my computer crashed and took my edits with it.  I got sick, I moved, I finished the film 4 times and discovered I didn’t like the way it came out.  I finally got it to look halfway decent and kicked it out of the nest to fly or die on its own.  You can sample SCREAM ZOMBIE SCREAM on YouTube.  Besides the ZOMBIE LULLABY, there is a scene between Orpheus and JoAnn, and a trailer I made.   We’re still working on how it will be sold.  Stay tuned.  Anyway, that’s where this movie came from.

Earth Versus the Spider

Earth Versus the Spider, 1958, 73 minutes, black & white, American International Pictures, directed by Bert I. Gordon, produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff. Starring Ed Kemmer as Mr. Kingston, June Kenny as Carol Flynn, Eugene Persson as Mike Simpson, Gene Roth as Sheriff Cagle, Hank Patterson as Hugo the Janitor, Merritt Stone as Mr. Flynn. (Also known as The Spider) Schlock-Meter rating: 7 1/2 stars out of 10.

It would have been fun to have been alive and old enough to go to the movies in the 1950s. Imagine being able to see The Incredible Shrinking Man, I was a Teenage Werewolf, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Attack of the Puppet People, and so many others on a big screen. Earth Versus the Spider who have also been a treat to see as well. Okay, it’s pretty lame, stuffed full of stock characters and a lame looking big spider (courtesy of the all-time cheap FX winner, Mr. BIG, Bert I. Gordon), and the web in the “cave” looks like rope (and why doesn’t it stick to and trap those kids who travel all over it?).

But the film is fun to watch, and that garners it a 7 and a half on the Schlock-Meter. The plot concerns a giant spider who lives in a cave outside a small town. One day a typical dad disappears while driving home with a gift for his typical high school-age daughter. She and her typical high school boyfriend search for him in a typical cave and escape the spider. A typical beer-bellied sheriff laughs at their story, but is persuaded by a typical high school science teacher “egghead” to check things out. They encounter the spider and supposedly kill it with massive doses of DDT. But typically, the spider awakes in the high school gym during a typical school dance. Typically, the spider kills a typical janitor too stupid to run. Typically, the typical girl and her typical boyfriend have returned to the typical cave to find the gift dear old typical dad bought her (she left it there). Typically, the big spider returns to the cave and there’s a battle royal (or the type you can get for these type of low-budget films).

The spider makes a cool, annoying high-pitched whine whenever it is close and sounds a lot like several dozen mental patients screaming at once. The spider’s victims are rubber fake corpses with drawn faces made to look as if the blood has been sucked out of them. By all means rent Earth Versus the Spider. Sure it’s lame, but there’s hardly a dull moment in this tame predecessor to today’s Scream movies. It’s a look at bargain filmmaking generations ago.

-- Doug Gibson