All Cheerleaders Die (2013) is the baffling result of a collaboration between writer/directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson. The former directed May (2002) which was hailed as one of the most original horror films in years and then he got to do a show called Masters of Horror alongside such filmmaking legends as John Carpenter Don Coscarelli John Landis and Stuart Gordon. The other guy made I Know Who Killed Me (2007) the notorious Lindsay Lohan vehicle that “won” eight Razzie awards and which was hailed as one of the worst movies ever. When two talents like that team up you’ve just gotta be curious about the results.
Well it turns out that these two are collaborators from way back and their first film project ever was a 2001 thriller called …wait for it… All Cheerleaders Die. Yep this is a remake of a film they made right after college. They’re trying it again!
Anyways All Cheerleaders Die (the new one) starts off as a mostly tedious high school drama about stuck-up cheerleaders treating their friends badly. I say “mostly tedious” because there’s a shocking and well-executed plot twist in the pre-title sequence that is quite impressive. After that some awkward title cards and unclear character motivations indicate that we’re dealing with some extremely inconsistent talent behind the camera which is what you’d expect from the directing team of Lucky and Unlucky.
The high school soap opera bullshit eventually leads to a bizarre car chase in the middle of the night in which four cheerleaders fall to their deaths and get resurrected by a wiccan ritual performed (accidentally? It honestly isn’t clear) by a gothy classmate who wears a full inch of eyeliner and shrieks a lot.
The “cheerleaders rising from the dead” sequence is even weirder than such things usually are. Five colourful polished stones absorb the blood glow brightly start shaking and then fly through the air penetrating the girls’ open wounds and bringing them back to life with a thirst for blood.
Why is this happening? I don’t know. Nobody knows.
The goth girl seems just as surprised as the audience and if Shrieky McTeenwitch actually does know what’s going on she’s not telling. After vampirizing an innocent adult the girls decide to go to school wearing black leather cheerleader outfits like they’ve joined the X-Men. They also walk in slow motion to a pounding rock beat because they know they’re badasses now. Even though they don’t really want to be. And they keep having stomach pains from their embedded magic rocks. And two of them have switched brains for some reason.
Why is this happening? I don’t know. Nobody knows.
The killer vampire cheerleaders then try to blend in with the crowd and/or kill random students depending on how their mental coin flip landed that minute. A surprisingly large portion of this nonsense is played straight. In fact the only comedy comes at extremely unexpected moments usually when something ghastly has happened and it feels inappropriate to laugh. One of the girls makes love to her (extremely confused) boyfriend who thinks he’s with the girl’s sister because of that unexplained body-swap subplot. He’s quite happy to lose his virginity but is concerned later on when he learns that vaginas aren’t supposed to be ice cold.
A bunch of thuggish high school boys get killed by the girls but they kind of forget to go after the asshole ringleader who then has enough time to turn into a serial killer and starts harvesting the magical stones from the cheervampires and eating them in order to gain superpowers.
One more time I ask why is this happening? I don’t know. Nobody knows.
Oh and it ends abruptly flashing the revised title All Cheerleaders Die Part One. What the hell? You mean to say that Lucky and Schmucky still aren’t done with this story?
