Ah, Valentine's Day. Nothing like a day demanding couples buy each other flowers, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes and cute, cuddly teddy bears to let everyone know how much they're loved.

Or, as is the case in the new lovesick horror film "My Bloody Valentine 3-D," how badly we want to stick a pickaxe into their skull.

"Valentine," a remake of a 1981 Canadian slasher film, is old school in its approach to horror: gratuitous nudity, violence so excessive it's almost funny (OK, scratch the almost) and acts of inexplicable stupidity carried out by its main characters (running after someone with a flashlight in a dark forest, hiding behind a mattress-less bedspring and looking for the cause of whatever it was that went bump in the night).

It also adds a touch of novelty to the horrors of Valentine's Day by inserting the "3-D" equation into things, which involves a pair of cheap glasses viewers get with the movie. Although my theater was low-tech and went with the 2-D version, I understand theaters with the glasses charge a couple bucks more for the eyewear.

Even in two-dimensional mode, you can tell where the 3-D effects are utilized. These scenes usually involve a pickaxe spiraling toward the camera, and of course, the viewer. The technique might be cool for the novelty aspect, but it's not likely to drastically alter the quality of the movie.

The story goes that in the small mining town of Harmony (think any number of southeastern Ohio towns along the Ohio River), a miner named Harry Warden murdered 22 people in a mine on Valentine's Day. Warden was supposedly buried alive when the mine caved in shortly after the killings. Ten years later, the town is just starting to get over the heinous events of that blood bath when the pickaxe starts piercing flesh once again, again swung by a Darth Vader-breathing guy in a miner uniform.

Finding out who the killer is can only be so surprising when the movie gives us only about three possible suspects, but the "Scooby-Doo," whodunit aspect isn't really the point here.

The point is the gratuitous gorefest we're witness to, in the spirit of a good scare. Body organs are removed from their intended locations, blood spews by the gallon, and screams ring piercingly throughout the movie.

In the spirit of grainy, old-school horror flicks, the acting is amateurish, the plot developments nonexistent, and the scares not so scary. Also in that low-budget spirit, "My Bloody Valentine" isn't particularly good, and exists primarily to answer the age-old question: Just how many body parts can you stick a 3-D pickaxe through?

If you're around to answer the question, you apparently ducked in time.

Joel Sensenig is news editor of the Review Times. He has never swung a pickaxe.