Review of Stupid Teenagers Must Die (2006) by Josh G — 18 Apr 2008

A friend and I picked up Stupid Teenagers Must Die a couple of days ago based on the fact that both the DVD case and the DVD itself proclaim in bold letters, WARNING: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE AND GRATUITOUS NUDITY. Our suspicions were that this was a lie meant simply to entice cheap-horror nerds like ourselves. My friend joked that there would be nothing in the movie, then at the end they would look at the camera and say, "Gotcha!".

It's difficult for me to say exactly how I feel about the movie. On the one hand, it is irrefutably bad -- so much so that I don't know whether I could have stood it on my own. We open with a dimly-lit, muffled shot of a couple having clothed sex on the couch, after which the girl leaves and the man gets stabbed in the neck. Ketchup-bottle blood squirts out of his neck, then he falls down while the camera watches the fake blood pool around him for a couple of minutes.

But that's just a prologue. The real movie involves several annoying teenagers meant to fulfill '80s stereotypes, since that's when the movie takes place -- even though a sepia colored film doesn't make an obviously modern setting look older. The teens want to hold a seance, but of course something goes awry and people begin dying off one by one. The dialogue is stupid ("This is some sick, fucked up twist in a sick, fucked up game that you sick, fucked up assholes are playing!"), but not stupid enough to be funny. The acting is terrible. The nudity is far from gratuitous. In fact, the movie seems to purposely squander opportunities for nudity. Take the clothed sexual encounter on the couch in the opening, or how about after a girl gets fake blood on herself -- one of the guys tells her that the shower works, and the then uses the sink to provide a short topless scene.

Which is why Stupid Teenagers Must Die is difficult to rate. From the title alone, it's obvious that this movie is a satire of the horror genre. The characters are purposely stereotypical, the acting intentionally bad, the lighting and sound intentionally turned down. So is the fact that the violence looks like a high school film project part of the joke? Is the fact that there is very limited nudity in the movie part of the joke? Is the joke on me for thinking this is a bad movie? Is Stupid Teenagers Must Die really a movie that is just pretending to be bad in order to make fun of other movies like this, and, by association, horror fans like myself?

So there we have these two ways to look at the movie. In the one view, we've got a movie made by a few friends with a camera and a shoestring budget that just turned out bad. This explains why after the credits roll, they flash the address for the myspace page of the band who did the music for the film.

In the other view, it's a movie made by people who knew what they were doing and had every intention of making this movie as campy as possible in the name of providing a jab at the horror genre in general. This explains why -- just as my friend supposed would happen -- one of the actors looks at the camera after the credits and yells, "Gotcha!".

As for me, I'm thinking that it falls somewhere in between. The idea may have been to satirize the horror genre, but the filmmakers seem to think that they're much better at what they're doing than they really are; so the movie ends up being taken at face value, as the exact type of film that the movie is supposedly criticizing. Superficial in-jokes (the characters names are Alfie, Jamie, Sissy, etc.) and hilarious dialogue may sound clever on paper, but that doesn't come across on-screen.

At best, Stupid Teenagers Must Die feels like a first draft that should have been re-worked two or three more times.