All Cheerleaders Die

Hated it. Hated it with a passion. This is a movie I’d heard about a while ago, and the premise sounded fun. A bunch of cheerleaders die in an accident, and they come back as zombies to wreak their revenge. Sounds fun, right?

Well it isn’t. This movie is not fun. This movie takes what should be a fun premise and makes it not fun, removing any pleasure that there could be had by being weird and serious. 

Synopsis time!

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The story begins with unlikeable and boring teenager Maddy trying out for the cheerleading team at her high school. Her childhood friend Alexis had recently died accidentally when botching a cheerleading jump, and her boyfriend (and captain of the school football team) Terry instantly hooks up with another cheerleader, Tracy.

Maddy is angry that Alexis’ ‘friends’ would get over her death so quickly and lightly, particularly Terry and Tracy, so she concocts a plan to break them up and thereby ruin their senior year of high school. It’s a super dumb plan but whatever, let’s roll with it.

Maddy dolls herself up and acts bitchy and scores herself a spot on the cheerleading team with those skills alone, and is instantly welcomed into the circle of cheerleading friends (who self-appoint themselves the nickname ‘bitches’). It’s comprised solely of herself, Tracey and two sisters, a hot one and a plain one (this is actually a plot point). Maddy then sets her plan into motion, by seducing Tracy into a lesbian relationship. This is a dumb plan.

Threatening to disrupt this dumb plan is Leena, Maddy’s weird friend/possible girlfriend who is into wiccan witchcraft. Leena complains that Maddy is acting strange and isn’t herself, to which Maddy just sort of says ‘I’m fine, leave me alone’.  All of their scenes together are weird since there’s this forced sort of lesbian thing they’re trying to do but the girls have no chemistry whatsoever.

Anyway the ‘bitches’ meet up with the ‘dogs’ (what Terry keeps referring his football friends as) at some make-out point to sit around and do nothing. Creepy wiccan girl Leena is also there, until everybody scares her off by making fun of her stupid wiccan crap. Maddy puts her plan into action by making out with Tracy.

Terry, seeing Tracy and Maddy make out, gets pissed off and mandates that the dogs (comprised of the stoner, the ‘good’ one, the subordinate and the wimpy one) can no longer date or socialise with the cheerleaders. Instead he tells them they’ll screw all the other girls in school. For some reason he seems to think that this is a really big smackdown on the cheerleaders.

After Maddy eggs her on (another part of the master plan I guess), Tracy belittles Terry in front of his ‘dogs’, telling him that she’s going to spread the word that he’s got a small dick. Terry, who has obvious rage issues, doesn’t take it too well and punches her in the face super hard. Everybody is completely shocked, and Maddy gloats that once they tell everyone, Terry’s football career is done (I’m guessing this is meant to be the culmination of her plan). Terry doesn’t take this well either and becomes determined to silence them. He takes their phones and basically assaults them, while his dogs sort of stand around and let it happen.

The cheerleaders try to drive away in a car, but Terry and his dogs give chase and drive the girls off the road and into the river, where the heroic football team leaves them for dead. It’s odd to note here that his ‘dogs’ don’t seem to object to this or Terry’s sudden psychopathic determination to kill a bunch of girls for no reason. He’s obviously the alpha male in the dog pack.

Leena, who just happened to have been hanging out in her car right next to the lake, pulls the cheerleader’s corpses out of the river and uses her magical stone magic bullshit to bring them back to life as zombie vampires (I guess?).

The girls wake up the next morning in Leena’s house. Leena tells them that they all died and that she brought them back to life with her wiccan stone magic whatever – something the girls scoff at despite all of the evidence, including: 1. They all remember getting killed, 2. They all still have their death wounds, 3. They all have a magical glowing stone embedded in their bodies and, 4. The two sisters (sorry, I don’t remember their names) have switched bodies for some reason, with the hot one going into the plain one’s body and vice versa.

Unsurprisingly Maddy is the last one to believe this, only after another forced ‘lesbian relationship’ side-plot thing when Leena makes her touch her chest for her pulse. The girls are all revived, but they need blood to survive, so they kill Leena’s next door neighbour and drain his blood, leaving them feeling really good. For some reason they all share sensations, including Leena for some reason, despite not being dead.

The girls go to school, to the shock of Terry and his dogs. Terry then tries to intimidate the girls he sort of killed by threatening them with violence and Maddy tells him that she’s going to full-on murder him. The plain sister is treated nicely because she’s in the hot sister’s body, which boosts her confidence, while the hot sister is mocked for looking plain. She does not like this turn of events.

The plain sister, wanting to take advantage of the hot sister’s body, seduces the hot sister’s boyfriend (the wimpy dog) and screws him in the disabled toilets. All the other girls, including Leena, share the sensation and have sudden orgasms around the school. Simultaneously, Tracey, who went to get high with the stoner dog, accidentally kills him (for some reason the gemstone lodged in her head flies out and cracks open his skull) and drains his blood, and the girls feel this as well.

The hot sister, in the plain sister’s body, gets angry at her boyfriend’s apparent infidelity so she kills him and feeds from him. For some weird reason none of the other girls feel this sensation. Why? Because the story is full of half-baked, inconsistent nonsense like this.

Through happenstance and nonsense, Terry and his subordinate figure out that the girls are zombies and that the magic stones hold all the power , so he steals the stones that Leena had stuffed away in her locker (not the safest place to put them methinks).

Later that night the girls, alone in a house, show us what beacons of femininity they are by bickering with each other and storming off. The sisters argue about the guy they screwed/killed, Maddy acts like a bitch for no real reason while Leena is being whiny and needy. Then the rest of the cheerleaders turn on Maddy when, somehow, they find a video blog Maddy had made where she lays out her dumb plan from the beginning to split up Terry and Tracy and how she doesn’t actually like any of the other cheerleader girls. The cheerleaders scatter to the wind, while Leena and Maddy chat.

Maddy reveals, in a totally unnecessary moment, that Terry raped her after Alexis died and that she’s got it on tape. This is unnecessary since we’ve already established, to a massive degree, that Terry is awful, so adding stuff this late in the game doesn’t really affect much. I guess maybe it’s meant to justify why she was willing to go so far with her stupid plan, but even that’s stupid since the details open up more questions. Why make an elaborate plan (involving seducing another woman no less) to have him break up with his girlfriend when you could have sent the tape to the police and had him arrested? Totally stupid nonsense.

Anyway Terry and his subordinate are driving around the neighbourhood in a rape van (you know, windowless panel van) and abduct the plain sister and cut out her glowing stone thing, killing her. How they knew to do this is beyond me. And how this worked now, when Tracy’s stone came out on its own and never killed her, is also beyond me. The hot sister feels this and runs to the van for revenge, killing the subordinate before turning her attention to Terry. Terry, in a move that defines all logic, eats the glowing stone…and gains super strength. Once again, how the hell did he know this?

The rest of the girls arrive, and super-powered Terry has taken the hot sister hostage. The ‘good’ dog (the only one to show any remorse to the whole ‘killed a bunch of cheerleaders’ thing) arrives to apologise and Terry drives off with the hot sister. Maddy kills and drains the ‘good’ footballer, just because I guess, and goes in pursuit of Terry with Leena and Tracy.

They end up at a cemetery where Terry has already killed the hot sister and absorbed her stone thing. Maddy runs into a tree and is impaled (but alive) while Tracey falls into a pit that is full of bear traps for some reason and dies. Bear trap pit makes zero sense to me. Why was it even there? I feel as though the movie wants it to seem like Terry set that up, but when and how? He didn’t know at all that he was going to be heading there, and he never had the time to set up something so elaborate.

Anyway Terry drags Leena away to kill her or something, leaving Maddy to pull herself off the tree and absorb Tracy’s stone thing. As Terry is about to kill Leena, Maddy stabs him, and then instantly finds herself being overpowered by him. As Terry is about to kill her, Leena uses shrieking and magic to pull the stones out of everybody, killing Terry and Maddy. She starts shrieking again because she’s sad that Maddy’s dead, but then one of the stones goes into Maddy and she comes back to life, and the two make out.

But then, in a stupid, meaningless final shock, one of the rocks somehow sinks into a grave and the zombified corpse of Alexis bursts out of the ground all angry and shit. The end.

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I didn’t like this movie (a trend for this blog), and I knew I wouldn’t within the first fifteen minutes. Nothing really works and it’s never fun. If it had a more humorous edge then maybe it could have been fun, but it’s oddly morose and serious for the vast majority of its length.

Maddy, the main character, is an unlikeable, unpleasant bitch. Actually all the characters are infinitely unlikeable, but Maddy in particular is all kinds of awful (part of it may just be her actress). From the beginning to the end she’s so unlikeable and bitchy. She’s awful to absolutely everybody and just sucks the enjoyment out of an already sucky movie. The whole ‘rape’ aspect is used as a lazy justification for her being this way, as the movie (and Leena) constantly tries to tell us she’s not usually this way. That only works if we get to see what she’s actually like from the beginning.

Leena and her weird lesbian relationship thing with Maddy is really weird. I guess they were trying to hint that they were a couple before the rape/revenge thing. The whole lesbian stuff doesn’t feel real, it feels a bit like pandering. I guess Maddy is meant to be a lesbian, hence why her plan involves seducing Tracy, but you never get the impression it’s genuine. 

I’d heard that it’s meant to be subversive and switch up gender roles in horror films, empowering the female characters, but it really doesn’t. The girls act in the exact same way as in any other crappy horror film – they fight amongst themselves, they bully each other, they act slutty. Oh, and they shriek constantly. Like all the time. A whole lot of the movie is shrieking. The finale actually involves shrieking to save the day. And the girls are woefully weak compared to Terry. Even human Terry was enough to overpower and kill one of them, and once he becomes super Terry the rest of the girls have no chance. It falls on so many character and story clichés its ridiculous, and doesn’t have a funny or satirical edge to pull it through.

Pacing is weird. It takes over forty minutes for the girls to die and come back as zombies, and from there not much actually happens until the last ten minutes. The whole ‘cheerleaders become zombies’ thing could make a fun movie, but not here. If you’ll remember, Jennifer’s Body had a similar concept, and that sucked pretty damn badly. This one is pretty damn bad as well, made worse in how it plays things so damn seriously, sucking the fun out of the wasted premise.

Terry is a freaking full-on psychopath. He’s a total rapist, has no problems hitting girls and basically intimidates his ‘friends’ into following him and his bullshit. He’s the sort of high school bully Stephen King writes, the types that do things that are too ridiculously evil and over the top.

So, in my final assessment, All Cheerleaders Die sucks. Don’t waste your time.  

One final note: When Alexis pops out of her grave for the ending shock, she’s dressed in her cheerleading outfit. That means that’s what she was buried in. What the hell?