YMMV / Valentine Man

• Awesome Moments:
  • Bruno Valentine busting into the church to save a captive Henri, burning as much as he can in an attempt to stop his mother.
  • Henri completely fools Helen, luring her into a trap for the Padre by making a deal with it: allowing it to drain Helen of blood when it's freed from her control. Bruno then tears his mother's heart out while Henri throws her to her death in the Padre's guts.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Everything about Henri and Bruno's relationship becomes touching. Henri does his best to educate Bruno in normal behavior and to keep him on the straight and narrow while never certain he's doing a good job whatsoever. Only at the end does he realize he's become an inspiration to Bruno, who takes cues of how to be a good person from him.
  • Bruno's returned feelings towards Henri as well. Only informed by Doug about Henri, and providing Doug with a human level of solace for a year, Bruno finds someone in Henri who is truly concerned for and cares about him as a person after a lifetime of abuse and exploitation by literally everyone else he encountered beyond Doug.
  • Henri learns how much Doug truly loved him before Helen got her hooks into them. According to Bruno, Doug described Henri as a breathtaking photographer and the person who would make his dream a reality along with Anita.
• Nightmare Fuel: As chilling and Body Horror fueled as the original Valentine with some twisted moments all about.
  • Lampreda is one of Helen's less presentable children. 'The Lamprey Man' is a bloated monster with a mouth like a lamprey that relentlessly stalks its prey and doesn't hesitate to tear apart and eat anyone in its path.
  • Henri's powers. After being soaked in the blood of the Padre, the creature behind Bacio's cult, Henri's body mutates so he can utilize Body Horror focused abilities that he can't always control. There's nothing pretty about it and Henri looks like a total monster, with his trachea even becoming a fanged, snake-like entity. At one point, this kills a mugger when he doesn't even mean it to.
  • Helen's parenting style is as twisted as one expects. In addition to molesting her own kids, Helen encourages Brother–Sister Incest among one another with them so warped by the control of their father that they can't really comprehend it's wrong. Other kids Helen takes out of Bacio to show them how twisted the world can actually be, where she traffics them to pedophiles around the world.
  • The animal pen, Helen's special stable for those she takes in from outside Bacio. Deciding to keep these people as pets, Helen twists them about to turn them into flesh-bent abominations that resemble animals; men, women and children alike whose minds are warped beyond measure and only exist as grotesque playthings for the queen of Bacio.
  • Helen's true goals, to unleash the Padre on the world, transform herself into a being greater than human and turn the world into what she's made of Bacio. In essence, destroying everyone's inhibitions until all that remains are her sex dolls that live in her image...and to drive it home, she shows the rivers underneath Bacio in the Padre's fluids, where she has confined thousands of her own children.
• Tearjerker:
  • Henri finding Doug and Anita, or what's left of them. He accepts that there's no saving them at all and Anita is long gone with only a broken shell in its place. Doug can't be saved either, and Henri can only put down everyone in the 'animal pen' except Doug, so the latter can live to see Helen's end. It absolutely destroys Henri, traumatizing him to the point he snaps at Bruno after.
  • Everything about Bruno, which he hides behind his cheerful enthusiasm. Bruno can barely function like a normal person as a result of his upbringing filled with mind control, molestation and his own mother selling him to pedophiles until as recently as ten months before Valentine Man begins. When Henri actually shows anger over the animal pen, Bruno wilts completely and reveals how scared and lonely he is under his cheerfulness.
• The Woobie:
  • Henri Barrow. His life has been upended, hes stuck in a foreign country after he's been mutated by a monster to be a walking body horror repository. His best friends are gone, worse than dead, and he's being hunted by the most evil woman in all of Italy. To say he's had it hard is an understatement.
  • Bruno Valentine is the only child of Valentine free of the control of his father, 'The Padre.' Having lived his life enslaved to his mother's whims and even sold to pedophiles to 'prove' to him normal people didn't exist. Bruno seeks out Henri to stop his mother and despite his cheerfulness, it's easy to see how hurt and damaged he is under everything.
  • Il Padre of all beings is turned into this by the end. It came to earth with a message that Helen corrupted, being enslaved by her and turned into nothing but her sex slave and avenue to corrupt the earth entirely.