By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Dean Midas’s Eve Valentine is an enthusiastic and well directed horror short that sadly suffers in one key area.
The plot of the film centres around the eponymous antagonist Eve Valentine, a serial killer whom the residents of a small town in County Durham think to be long dead- but who in actuality is still very much alive and ready to go on a killing spree once again.
From a visual and editing standpoint the short is a very strong piece of work. Midas is clearly a director who understands how to position a camera properly, the movie uses its wet and rainy Durham location wonderfully, and the editing is smooth and fluid, never allowing the movie’s pace to meander for even half a second.
Midas is a director who appears to be a keen student of the horror genre, with Eve Valentine’s look and plot being more than likely taken from George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine, as well as the hotel sequence and the tracking shot of the house towards the conclusion both appearing to be paying homage to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Where Eve Valentine stumbles however, is in the sound department. There are a few scenes in the movie where the dialogue isn’t quite synched properly- to the extent that you notice it, and the film’s score at times really doesn’t fit the atmosphere that Midas is trying to create, with some of the song choices, such as the pop tracks that play during the credits and in the lead up to the final confrontation, being far too tonally out of place for a dark slasher movie.
This is made all the more frustrating because during the beginning of the movie where it’s establishing Eve’s threat, the music chosen by Midas is tonally perfect and helps to create a strong sense of tension, making his choice to abandon that for jaunty and upbeat generic radio pop music even more confusing than it already was.
To conclude, Eve Valentine, despite some tonal and technical inconsistencies, is a short where you can see the passion that Dean Midas has for filmmaking writ large.
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