Eli Roth’s Be Mine: A VR Valentine’s Slasher review – boilerplate schlock

Eli Roth not only gave his imprimatur to this 30 minute 360 video, but has implied ownership of it—the full title being Eli Rother’s BE MINE: A VR Valentine’s Slasher. The horror maestro and peddler of low-rent grotesqueries only wrote the script of this grisly tale about a young woman stalked by a psycho—dubbed the “Cupid Killer”—who murders her love interests; it was directed by Adam MacDonald. And by “written,” it’s really one of those scripts that feels more like regurgitation, mashed together from the innards of countless genre productions also riddled with a rote plot, crummy special effects, and generally dodgy acting.

There is however one notable exception: the performance of its lead star Peyton List. List, surprise surprise, didn’t receive any Oscar nominations (or VR industry awards) but she’s an engaging presence and lifts the film. Ordinarily I wouldn’t use that word, film, to describe a 360 video; I’ve written at length about applying the nomenclature of existing mediums to emerging ones. But here it’s intentional: this is one of those VR experiences that follows the rules of traditional filmmaking and pretends they work just as good in the new medium. There are brief touches of the kind of visual embellishments that work in VR—such as first-person immersions—but they’re extraneous, and over before they’ve really begun. 

A gnarly intro scene sets the tone, capturing the death of a young man killed after walking home with Peyton List’s Becca; he makes the fatal mistake of moving in to kiss her. She moves in too—but before their lips connect he’s slain by the Cupid Killer, who’s earnt that moniker for their dexterity with a crossbow. The story jumps ahead 10 years, with Becca’s friends convincing her to have a big Valentine’s Day party in the hope of drawing the killer out and taking them down. “Then one day Ryan Murphy makes a series about us!”, exclaims one of her pals. 

The party is your typical college bash, youngsters being doofuses and guzzling booze from plastic red cups. Two cops are there to watch out for the psycho, but they get picked off quickly. Several of Becca’s friends also meet terrible demises, one getting shot with an arrow while standing above a bar, her blood spraying everybody in an icky mist. At the end there’s a significant twist (no spoilers) but nothing in this experience feels fresh or ambitious. It’s all terribly boilerplate. 

BE MINE is one of those schlocky horror productions that feels intentionally bad, cooked up for genre enthusiasts who’ll take anything served with an extra side of gore. Why on earth this was made for VR is the big, vexing question, given MacDonald’s devotion to traditional filmmaking’s grammar and syntax. My favourite moment shows how an image that would look ordinary in a film—a close-up tracking shot of a row of books in a library—looks very odd in VR. It feels weird because the scale is off. We’re now very very close to the books: they loom like giant ancient pillars before us. Did MacDonald not think, for a moment, that an experience watched on VR headsets should have a VR-centric approach?

Like BE MINE, another 360 video—Eli Roth’s Haunted House: Trick VR Treat—comes with the horror guru’s imprimatur. This one, god forbid, was actually directed by him. It’s not great, that’s for sure, and it too is cribbed from the language of traditional filmmaking. But, inspired by haunted house amusement park experiences, it does have some embellishments that suggest a basic understanding of VR’s strengths: namely the importance of using space to reveal information. MacDonald, however, seems determined not to embrace the strengths of the nascent medium, and sticks his head in the virtual sand. His attitude seems to be: take the same approaches to conventional filmmaking, bung ’em in, and hope for the best.