ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE (2013)

Studio:       Image Entertainment
Director:    Lucky McKee, Chris Sivertson
Writer:       Lucky McKee, Chris Sivertson
Producer:  Andrew van den Houten, Robert Tonino
Stars:     Caitlin Stasey, Sianoa Smit-McPhee, Brooke Butler, Tom Williamson, Amanda Grace Cooper, Reanin Johannink, Nicholas S. Morrison, Chris Petrovski, Leigh Parker, Jordan Wilson, Felisha Cooper, Michael Bowen

Review Score:

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Summary:

Aided by the power of mysterious Wiccan stones, a high school cheer squad plots their revenge against the football players who wronged them.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Maddy Killian reviews her Blackfoot High video profile of head cheerleader Alexis Andersen. At the end of the video, Lexi falls on her head and dies when a cheerleading stunt goes wrong.

Three Months Later, Two Days Before Senior Year – Lexi’s ex-boyfriend Terry Stankus, who is also captain of the football team, has moved on to dating new head cheerleader Tracy Bingham. Quarterback Vik De Palma has a crush on Maddy. Manchester ‘Manny’ Mankiewitz is interested in cheerleader Martha Popkin, but she shuns his affections because of her religious beliefs. Martha’s younger sister Hanna is the school’s mascot while George Shank and Ben round out Terry’s crew of friends.

Maddy plots her revenge on Terry and the cheerleaders for Lexi’s death. Her plan begins by joining the cheerleading squad and befriending Tracy. Maddy inspires Tracy to break up with Terry by telling her that he had a fling with Cassie Decker. Maddy and Tracy then begin a lesbian relationship.

Maddy’s ex-girlfriend Leena Miller learns of Maddy’s new relationship at a party in Mount Shebesta Cemetery. Hanna finds Leena using Wiccan stones in some sort of ritual afterwards. Terry and the football players confront the cheerleaders at the party. The confrontation ends with Terry punching Tracy.

The cheerleaders escape in Martha’s car. With his football friends as passengers, Terry pursues the girls and runs them off the road. Terry stops the other boys from a rescue attempt when the girls’ car drives into the water below a cliff.

Leena pulls the bodies from the water, but the girls are already dead. Leena’s Wiccan crystals suddenly glow brightly. One stone rolls into each girl’s body, including Leena, and the cheerleaders inexplicably come back to life.

The girls awake the next day in Leena’s house and attempt to puzzle out what happened. Martha and Hanna discover that they have swapped bodies. The girls then realize that they now have a hunger to feed on blood after Tracy is drawn across the street to kill Leena’s neighbor Larry. They also learn that everyone feels it whenever someone feeds or when one of them is injured.

The girls return to school with a plan to take revenge on the football players. Tracy kills Ben after smoking pot in his van. In Martha’s body, Hanna seduces Manny and has sex with him in the handicapped bathroom stall. Martha finds out and later kills Manny while she is in Hanna’s body. Terry and George realize that something supernatural is going on.

The other girls learn from a video journal that Maddy was initially only pretending to be the cheerleaders’ friend. Tracy and Martha storm out of Leena’s house after the revelation. Maddy confesses to Leena that she was raped by Terry while interviewing him after Lexi’s death for her video project.

Terry and George abduct Hanna, who is still in Martha’s body, and carve the stone out of her. The other girls all feel Hanna’s death. Martha finds the two boys and kills George. Terry then swallows Hanna’s stone and gains its supernatural power, which gives him the strength to overpower Martha.

Maddy feeds on Vik to gain strength. She and Leena then chase Terry to Mount Shebesta when he kidnaps Martha, but he kills Martha and swallows her stone. Tracy arrives and runs after Terry when he flees into the forest, but she falls into a pit and dies in Terry’s animal traps.

Terry captures Leena and demands to know the secret of the stones’ power. Maddy attacks Terry from behind. Once he is distracted, Leena uses the stones to kill him, although he kills Maddy first. A stone then returns to both Leena and to Maddy, bringing Maddy back to life in the process. Another stone then falls into the ground and resurrects Lexi as a raving zombie.

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Review:

Bitchy cheer squad captain.  Self-centered football jock.  Misfit goth loner with black eyeliner, and pimple-faced nerd who is the brunt of the hot girl’s insults.  “All Cheerleaders Die” opens on a stage set for a run-of-the-mill romp featuring every tired teen trope imaginable faster than a bored moviegoer can groan, “not another one of these.”  Then at the three-minute mark, the movie drops the premise on its head in more ways than one and becomes an unpredictable fright fest of neck twists, sharp turns, and snappy satire.

After a tragic accident permanently sidelines head cheerleader Lexi, her friend Maddy decides to seek surreptitious revenge against the useless athletes and catty cheer squad teammates she feels are responsible.  Meanwhile, Blackfoot High is otherwise preoccupied with the usual drama of boyfriend swapping, sexual orientation questioning, and miscellaneous pubescent frustrations that come with being an angst-ridden backbiting teenager in the movies.

At first glance, the pump seems primed for spurting out a vengeful high school horror slasher along the lines of “Prom Night” or “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane” (review here).  If not that, perhaps a Halloween-themed extended episode of “Degrassi.”  But Maddy only gets as far as infiltrating the spirit squad and jamming a wedge between new cheer captain Tracy and bad boy football team leader Terry when things go belly up.  Before Maddy can move on to phase two of what was presumably a diabolical plan, the story crashes through a guardrail and literally goes off a cliff.  Falling into the chasm with it are any expectations of where it looked like “All Cheerleaders Die” was headed.

A dozen years after the fact, fan favorite filmmakers Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson revisit their seldom-seen 2001 collaboration of the same title for a smirking stab at teen-centric terror peppered with a healthy dash of subversive snark.  Their particular brand of humor here is more of the subtle commentary kind rather than the laugh out loud variety.  Yet where “All Cheerleaders Die” makes its deepest mark is in the way it frequently jumps genres by incorporating elements of vampirism, zombies, witchcraft, body swapping, straight up murder, and even a Corsican Brothers-like connection between its central characters.

Putting those concepts into perspective by revealing how they fit into the plotline would spoil much of the enjoyment.  The main attraction of the film is the wild “wha huh” circuit it runs from one uncertain blind corner to the next.

Considering previous directorial efforts from Lucky McKee in particular, “All Cheerleaders Die” is an interesting variation from the bulk of his body of work.  Movies like “May” and “The Woman” carry graver tones regarding misogyny and the perception of relationships between the sexes.  “All Cheerleaders Die” is an intentionally more playful film that teases with stereotypes of comely cheerleaders and teenage gender roles, yet remains focused on the escapist entertainment aspect of its themes rather than delving into thoughtful social relevancy.

The tongue-in-cheek nature does result in an at times uneven delivery occasionally upsetting the tempo.  One scene at the midpoint skips ahead briefly only to jump immediately backward following a flash of “four minutes earlier” text.  Such an out of place moment has its intention muddled when the rest of the narrative plays so straight and to the point.  Several characterizations suffer from some other corner cutting, such as chief antagonist Terry.  Although he lights up both literally and figuratively during the last act, he is someone that could have benefitted from a beefier personality injection of something less stonefaced.

Then again, “All Cheerleaders Die” is a film with frisky fun on the brain, not a goal of perfecting the subgenres it toys with.  At just a few ticks over 80 minutes, the movie is brisk enough that it can pull liberally from an overstuffed bag of ideas without the stalled moments putting the brakes on a spirited momentum.  “All Cheerleaders Die” makes an inspired mix out of familiar concepts and unfurls in a manner that is unusual and unexpected, but nearly always entertaining.

Review Score:  75

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