Lovers Lane (1999) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Yup, that's really the title - Lovers Lane, with no apostrophes.

Sometimes a movie comes along that is just so dazzlingly original that it defies our senses to keep up. Run, Lola, Run was such a film. Here, too, is such a film. The plot says it all.

13 years ago, a madman with one of those pirate hook hands killed two adulterous lovers at Lovers Lane on Valentine's Day. Now, he has escaped from the insane asylum and intends to kill the children of the original couple, also on Valentine's Day.

How did they think of that stuff? Killing the adulterous, sexually promiscuous teens? The insane guy escaping the asylum and coming back for the victim's relatives? The hook hand? The holiday theme? Whoa!

I regret to report to you that the execution of the story is even worse than the summary. It's dark. It's confusing. It's sometimes inaudible. Not that it would be any better if you could see it or hear it. The hook dude's powers kept changing from "regular insane guy" to "supernatural force guy", or at least it seemed that way for a while, until we found out that there were tons of hook dudes. The madman's psychologist (the guy who played Les Nessman on WKRP) and the psychologist's daughter were also insane, and were committing hook copycat murders to complete their own personal vendettas. And I think there were two more hook dudes that I never figured out at all. At one point, there were so many people walking around with hook hands that it looked like open auditions for Peter Pan. After a while there were more hook dudes than potential victims, so the spare hook dudes and dudesses were hiring out for deep-sea fishing expeditions.

This may have been intended to be a straight-faced genre parody. The difference between this and the Scream series is that it didn't constantly tell you it was kidding. You had to figure it out on your own. I'm pretty sure that was the intention. For example, the opening scene seems to have been acted poorly on purpose, and the pure camp of it could not have been unintentional. The sheriff's four year old daughter was in the car, came out tearlessly, and coolly placed a Valentine's present on her mother's mutilated corpse. The final scene seems to have added the dozens of hook dudes as a surrealist parody of the genre. Some other details provide clues of the humorous intent.'

• Anna Faris, from Scary Movie, is in this film as the high school's only cheerleader. Not only is she the only one, but she never removes her cheerleading outfit at any time in the film, in or out of school!
• The kids all hang out at XXX Root Beer.
• The back room of the convenience store is bigger than Pennsylvania Station.
• In the opening scene, when the sheriff sees his dead wife, one of the other policemen looks at the mutilated corpse and, well within earshot of the sheriff, says flippantly "whoa - that had to hurt!".
• Les Nessman (who now looks exactly like Red Buttons) comes to the school for a meeting with the principal, and he marches into her office with an attack dog, probably just before giving her the Buckeye hog reports.
• There really is a hog in the film later, at a crucial point, and it appears completely out of nowhere, with no apparent justification, then disappears as quickly.
• At one point, the high school principal punches out one of her female students.

I just can't believe all of that was meant to be taken seriously.

As the film ends, we see the two remaining teens being driven to safety, and the door of the vehicle is pulled closed by - what else - a hook! Heaven knows which member of the Hook family this was, but I think I may have heard a ticking clock as well.