Another psycho slasher is on the loose in another small town. In this one, it’s a guy with an old Valentine’s Day grudge that started with a mining accident on February 14, 1960. This little Canadian town stopped acknowledging V-Day for awhile, but now there’s a new generation who just want to have fun and they don’t care about grisly accidents from twenty years ago so they throw a party. In the mines! Eventually a killer shows up with a mining helmet and a pickaxe to hack up bodies and relieve us from having to pay attention to the boring love triangle among the principle characters. Some of the ghastly stuff here includes a dead body burned up in a laundromat dryer, a human heart delivered in a box of Valentine’s chocolates, a severed head in a refrigerator, and the hero’s Canadian accent.
This film came out at the height of the controversy over slasher movies, when big studios were cutting the balls off these films so that the publicity hungry Siskel & Ebert wouldn’t scold them too much on their stupid TV show. As a result, all of the kills here come and go in a flash. An uncut version, with restored gore, wouldn’t come out officially until 2009 on a special DVD release to coincide with the release of the remake.