Review of All Cheerleaders Die (2013) by Andrew K — 28 Jun 2014

ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE is overflowing with interesting horror ideas... too many, in fact, as it never really settles down into a groove. It throws a lot of stuff at the screen - a lot of it quite fun - but that leaves the movie feeling rather disjointed.

Does it want to be a female-driven high school satire in the vein of HEATHERS or MEAN GIRLS, albeit with a horror spin? Or does it want to be a supernatural revenge story? OR does it want to be about witchcraft and magic gems with the power to raise the dead? It wants to be all of those things, and while it's admirable that the filmmakers try to keep things lively by bouncing between tones and subgenres, any one of those threads would have been enough to hang an entire film upon.

As it stands, they mostly feel like undercooked components. There's another issue that's problematic, and that is the handling of the characters; with only one key exception, all of the leads are pretty much hateful assholes, and the kind of "high school students from hell" that you only find in the movies; even worse, the ostensible villain of the piece - a brooding football player - is basically a complete psychopath for no reason other than the plot requires him to be so.

All of this probably makes the movie sound terrible, but it really isn't; there are definitely some nifty moments and ideas in here, but it's just not at all a satisfying whole.