I know how you feel: A lot of the haunted houses you want to visit don't open til tomorrow night, including The Devils Attic, but you need something now! You need something to get you in the mood, to whet your appetite for live scares. You need a Thursday Thriller!
My pick for this week is All Cheerleaders Die.
The title alone builds expectations of a certain kind of movie, a well-worn VHS rental from 1983 that comprises helpless teenage girls with taut, little bodies being terrorized by a faceless maniac with a power tool of some kind. Toss those expectations aside. Yes, there are taut little bodies, but they're not displayed collectively in a gratuitous shower scene or anything. The nudity is fairly brief.
Society has made a lot of progress in 30 years. Now the girls are the monsters, unless you want to count the football team captain as the monster, or maybe you think the real monster is the intense pressure and rigid social pecking orders of life as a teenager. I'm getting sidetracked here.
This 2013 film written and directed by Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson delves into the world of high school cheerleading, the most dangerous of all high-school sports, according to squad captain Lexi in the opening sequence. She's only referring to catastrophic injuries, which happen soon enough. She and most of the other characters lack the self-awareness to see that the true danger lies in chasing a fleeting bit of social status above all else. In that subtext, All Cheerleaders Die is kind of like Mean Girls. In fact, if it was my movie, I might have called it Very Mean Girls, or Bloodthirsty, Undead, Incredibly Mean Girls, Indeed.
Again, I'm sidetracked. Sorry.
If I can just tell what happens quickly and without giving too much away, Lexi dies in one of those catastrophic injuries she was talking about. So Tracy steps in as squad captain and immediately starts dating Terry, the captain of the football team. That leaves a place open on the squad for Maddy, a misfit, closeted lesbian, who has an axe to grind against Terry. Maddy's been working on her revenge plot for a while and spends all her money on fancy clothes so she can blend in with the cheerleaders. She successfully infiltrates the squad and seduces Tracy.
So Tracy and Terry get in a big fight at a back-to-school party and Tracy tells Terry in front of everybody that he has a small dick. That doesn't sit well. One thing leads to another and on the drive home, the football boys run the cheerleader girls off a cliff, and just as the title promises, all cheerleaders die.
But it turns out Maddy's lesbian ex is a stalker who's into witchcraft. She uses some glowing rocks to revive the squad, who do a slow-walk into school the next day looking hotter than ever and ready to kill.
After that it gets kinda gory. Gossip Girl got nothing on this drama.
All Cheerleaders Die is streaming on Netflix, if you wanna give it a look. See you soon.
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