Have you ever seen a movie where you were fairly entertained but you thought it could have used a bit more polish? Perhaps the pacing, characters, story, almost every aspect could’ve use a bit more cooking. Well, All Cheerleaders Die is that movie.
The movie is about undead cheerleaders who need to consume human blood. That sounds awesome, and is kind of awesome — once it gets there. It takes half an hour (out of a 90 minute runtime) to actually get to our undead cheerleaders, and it’s a slow half hour.
The movie opens up with Maddy (Caitlin Stasey), our main character, videotaping her cheerleader friend Alexis (Felisha Cooper) and her fellow cheerleaders. However, the movie gives a pretty legitimate shock as Alexis falls on her head and dies during a routine in the first five minutes.
Maddy’s boyfriend, Terry, moves on too quickly with fellow cheerleader Tracy (Brooke Butler), and this angers Maddy, so she schemes to ruin them. The scheme involves Maddy seducing Tracy to make Terry jealous. In his jealousy, he ends up running the cheerleaders off the road to their deaths in a car chase after punching Tracy.
Perhaps more fortunate for them is that Maddy’s witch ex-girlfriend Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) happens to be watching them, and brings them back from the dead, as well as switching the bodies of two of the cheerleaders. However, now they have a thirst for blood.
Nearly every character is some variety of teen movie cliché. Terry is your standard psychopathic jock, the cheerleaders all fit the ‘dumb blonde’ trope, and of course there are two stoners. Even our main character, Maddy, fits that typical outsider character who isn’t really that much of an outsider. The whole Wiccan girl who has actual powers seems pretty familiar too.
The characters being walking, talking clichés is not a bad thing as it works in the context of movie — a horror comedy that makes fun of some of the typical horror movie conventions.
With that being said, the movie does falter in its characterizations. I’ll admit no one should walk into this movie expecting Oscar worthy characters, but they seem inconsistent, shifting motivations and traits from scene to scene.
Once the cheerleaders become undead, the movie starts to work and becomes quite entertaining. The scene where Tracy walks into a random guy’s house and discovers that she is hungry sets the mood for the rest of the film.
Tracy pokes the guy in the neck causing him to bleed, and all the cheerleaders show up and feed on him. It’s funny because the movie doesn’t really treat it as a big deal that the girls kill this innocent man with no apparent moral consequences or serious afterthought. The movie doesn’t go in the direction that they are evil after becoming undead. No, they just eat people sometimes. Their victim, after some initial screaming, resigns himself to his fate pretty easily, adding to the fact that this feeding is no big deal.
However, the movie takes too long to get to this point and seems a little unstructured at times — perhaps this can be chalked up to the fact that directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson are remaking their student film.
As it stands, it is still a fairly entertaining Friday night movie and is worthy of a watch, but be warned that you might walk out thinking this movie could have been a whole lot better.
