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.

The Witch (2015)

You know the drill - there's ALWAYS spoilers. Don't want the movie ruined for you, come back after you've seen it. Also - I'm still without an editor - typos and bad grammar await you! I keep hoping that the cultural obsession with zombies will end; literally every other damn movie that comes 'round seems to feature some sort of shambling, undead being bent on devouring the weak flesh of regular humans. Once upon a time, zombies have have been used as a metaphor for the blind consumerism created by our capitalist society, or the perceived depletion of resources by immigrants, or even the ravages of time and disease on our frail bodies. Now it seems that the deeper social commentary has been lost as audiences mindlessly consume "zombie fiction" in an attempt to keep up with trends. ( How very meta - a film buddy of mine commented on this assessment! ) All of this is just a sideways rant, leading up to my actual point: it seems that zombie may actually...

Mother!

Alright friends and readers–this one is probably doubly filled with typos and grammar errors because I wrote it while angry. Good luck and happy reading. There are unpopular opinions in every realm. As a film student, you can truly strike a nerve when you say things like, "I fucking hate the self-indulgence of independent films and the way people idolize them." Or, you know, "Low lighting and slow pacing does not a good movie make." Or whatever. You can of course, objectively, understand how this happens. When you are creating art–when you are outside the system so to speak–you are free to explore things (subjects, techniques, etc.) that may need to be addressed and that freedom can become intoxicating and go to one's head. While it may seem only right or only fair to respect and accept each creative endeavor that every artist undertakes, it is unreasonable to believe that the world will remain forever patient with the self-obsession artists have. Th...

The Babadook

Spoilers and typos! Enjoy. We often look back nostalgically on childhood, envious of the joy we felt and the boundless imaginations we possessed. How conveniently we forget the other side of that coin: as children, we experience a depth of terror our adult selves continually try to recreate for cathartic entertainment. When we try to bring those childhood fears to life on the screen, we often end up with movies about "things that go bump in the night," which is a somewhat superficial approach. While it does provide an opportunity for a supernatural experience, it ignores the root of our fear: the unknown . As children, we lack life experience. We lack nuance. We lack understanding. Not knowing creates in us fear. Yes, we fear what lurks in the darkness but we also fear the adult world because we do not understand how it works. The Babadook works to exploit both those fears. The short story: a widowed mother of a young boy experiences a mental breakdown and tries to...

i'm kael's ghost

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