Heart Eyes is a Valentine’s Day-themed horror/comedy about a burgeoning couple (Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding) who think they’re in a bad rom-com only to discover they’re in a terrible slasher movie.

Writer/producer Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) does to the rom-com what he previously did to the body-swap and time-loop comedy: adds some stabbings. And that’s it. Once again, zero thought is given to making the mash-up coherent, scary or funny. He has merely picked a trope, found a marketing angle to secure a cinematic release, and then 11 months holiday until it’s time to come up with another format to add stabbings to. Hopefully something autobiographical.

If any effort has been spent it is on making the film look as horrible as possible, and steadfastly avoiding anything that could legally be classified as a joke. There is for example a police duo called Hobbs and Shaw, a reference to a film that made almost as little cultural impact as Heart Eyes. And when someone helpfully explains the reference (“Like the movie?”) it is exactly as funny and awkward as it sounds. There is also a hilarious misunderstanding involving the crossword clue: “Five-letter word for a female dog.” It took three people to write this film.

And there are so many rom-com tropes to make fun of, all of them ignored in favour of inane dialogue and one monologue that’s literally just a list of rom-coms. Sure the central couple are smarmy and shallow, but they’re like that all the way through, even though we are seemingly meant to be rooting for them by the end, when the movie abandons all pretence of being a horror flick. What is the point in having insufferable characters in a slasher movie if not to see them mutilated?

The truth is there is no point, and there never was. This is contemptuous cynicism for its own sake, without even a target for that cynicism other than the paying audience. Heart Eyes fails as romance, horror, comedy and even parody, and yet is so unfathomably pleased with itself it should be called Unrequited.