All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

Does High school ever change? When I look at high school movies from my youth and compare them with the high school movies of today the only things that have changed are the clothes, the music, and possibly the insults teenagers hurl at one another.

The "popular" kids are terrible, hateful, entitled, conniving, monsters bent on making everyone else's lives miserable. The smart, sensitive, "outsider" kids are desperate to be accepted and appreciated but somehow thrive on their mistreatment at the hands of the other students.

We all love to hate the popular girls; they are so plastic and fake - with perfect skin and perfect bodies and perfect clothes and so on and so forth.

Imagine me rolling my eyes here because this type of drama is one of the many reasons I hated high school and went as infrequently as possible.

Despite anyone's attempts to say otherwise, All Cheerleaders Die is a waste of an hour and a half. Some have called it witty - because they have either never seen a good satire or because they don't speak English. The filmmakers clearly wanted the movie to be as campy and ridiculous as Idle Hands, but the movie just isn't funny because it continually takes itself too seriously.

It's like a lower budget Jawbreaker. A not as smart Mean Girls. A wanna be step-child of Jennifer's Body. Some sort of, "inspired by" Buffy type thing. All mixed up with some pieces of The Craft.

Side note:
Can someone please make me a montage of "bitchy high school girls stalk down the school hallway while sassy music plays and all other students stare" scenes?

Jawbreaker

The Craft

Mean Girls

They never really seemed to settle on a story:
A cheerleader dies, another decides to seek revenge on the dead girl's boyfriend (not for the death) but for his moving on too quickly to another girl. It'll be revealed later that she's really seeking revenge because he raped her. The other cheerleaders are petty idiots in hot bodies. The rapist boyfriend has a crew of mindless, followers with absolutely no personalities, who he drags into a drunken act that results in the remaining cheerleaders being killed. Luckily? The girl seeking revenge has an angry ex-girlfriend who practices witchcraft (as well as lesbianism) who bring the dead girls back to life. They aren't really vengeful, so much as sloppy, accidental murderesses.

Side note:
I'd like to know - how is the awkward, creepy, goth / Wiccan girl still a thing? Is that stereotype one that still actually resonates with teenagers? Or has the stereotype become so iconic that people just "get it" without actually knowing the context?

Anyway.

The girls are brought back using some arcane Pagan ritual that involves glowing stones and the full moon and a witch's passion, or some such bullshit. The reanimated cheerleaders are sort of zombies in so far as they must kill and consume something of a living being to survive. They don't eat flesh so much as "absorb" blood. They are portrayed somewhat like Succubi. Their feeding is very vampiric; sensual, eroticized, and reminiscent of Coppola's Dracula - when the brides feed from Jonathan.

Then, rapist boyfriend forcibly removes one of the stones from one of the girls (we get it - he has trouble understanding what "no" means.) and swallows it. He becomes imbued with demonic, inhuman super power (which we're led to believe he'll use to rape more classmates) and attacks the witch girl.

In the end - he's killed, Pagan girl and her undead girlfriend are reunited, and the cheerleader he killed is re-reanimated into some other kind of zombie-monster-thing.

Wrap up time:
You can watch the trailer here and then never have to sit through the movie. Lucky you.

Rebuttal: 17 Disturbing Horror Movies You Will Never Watch Again

When I'm not watching movies, I'm reading about movies. I stumble across all kinds of articles, blog posts, book excerpts, etc. in my quest to absorb as much movie knowledge as possible. Now, I'm snotty and loud-mouthed and opinionated but I'd never begrudge another human their opinion. Seriously. You're absolutely welcome to have any opinion about any thing you want. However, I must warn you, if I think your opinion is stupid, I'm absolutely going to say so. I've recently stumbled on an article completely brimming with so many idiotic opinions that I'm actually compelled to craft a response. Here's the gist of the original article: there are some horror movies out there that are so disturbing , you'll only ever want to watch them once. I've have taken her original list and refuted her claims without pulling her entire article over. You can read the original article here . Let's start at the beginning, with her opening statement

Escape From Tomorrow

I love creative people who are willing to take risks with their art. I appreciate the refusal to do things by the rules. I'm also terribly impatient with mediocrity. Enter Escape From Tomorrow . Created by a team of rogue filmmakers, the movie was shot in the video mode of high-end still cameras. Actors shared scripts and shooting locations across their smartphones. Shot on location at Disney World, the parks were completely unaware this was all going on right under their mouse ears. I wanted to love Escape From Tomorrow. More than that, I wanted to be completely taken with its ingenuity and creativity and - oh yes - its originality. And there is really a simple brilliance to their covert plan; all families are roaming around the parks, taking videos and chatting on their phones. Just blend the fuck in, act like you belong, and you won't get caught. Too bad the movie can be summed up as: ambitious but Rubbish. As you can imagine (or possibly know), there was a ton of con

What Is Genre And Why Should I Care?

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

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