Butcher knives, arrows, steaming irons and power drills -- Valentine's Day was never this painful.

But the new teen slasher flick Valentine is just as painful to watch.

Scream meets Halloween in director Rick Bota's suspense/horror film starring young upstarts Denise Richards (Wild Things, The World Is Not Enough) and David Boreanaz (TV's Angel).

Valentine starts out innocently enough with the vicious ridicule and beating of a junior high school nerd at a Valentine's dance.

The characters are introduced as a group of pre-teen giggly girls, braces and all.

Valentine then time-warps ahead, with the girls now in their mid-twenties.

When one of their pals gets iced at med school by a cherub mask-wearing psycho, the group is reunited at her funeral.

One by one, they receive threatening Valentine's Day cards with clever little sayings like, "Roses are red/violets are blue/they're going to need dental records/to identify you."

The cards are soon followed up by the onslaught of a vicious masked killer intent on offing the girls one by one. Valentine is a slow-moving, predictable movie that closely resembles the Scream and Urban Legend movies.

The killer looks similar to Halloween's bad man Michael Meyers and the climax takes place at a Valentine's Day house party (just like Scream).

Of the young cast, only Marley Shelton, as heroine Kate, demonstrates any acting ability.

Denise Richards, on the other hand, should stick to modelling.

She brings the movie to a crashing halt with her lackluster performance.

David Boreanaz was merely tolerable in his first big-screen role as Shelton's boyfriend.

But what Valentine lacked in plot it made up for in sexiness.

The female castmates are uniformly scantily-clad; Boreanaz is no eyesore either. But the super-sexiness of Valentine peaks in the middle of the killer's deadly spree when Richards takes time out to find a hottub and a bikini.

Valentine sticks closely to Hollywood formula, not revealing the killer's identity until the end.

But by that point, it'd be hard to find anyone in the theatre who still cared.

(This film is rated AA)

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