All Cheerleaders Die Movie Review

The film starts out as a teen comedy roll-out with cheerleader tryouts intercut with football practice and the requisite too-smart-for-their-own-good dialogue being whipped about by the cheer squad. After a tragic (but really darkly funny) accident involving the cheer captain Lexi, the film jets forward a bit to the start of the school year months later and new rounds of tryouts. Lexi’s best friend Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) is there, it seems, as a gesture to extend herself into Lexi’s world as a form of tribute. We know better and are pretty quickly clued in to Maddy’s revenge plans aimed squarely at Lexi’s quarterback-jackass boyfriend Terry (Tom Williamson) and his new (and head cheerleader) girlfriend Tracy (Brooke Butler) and burning their popular-kid house down.

Trouble is, Maddy has some past with dork-goth-castout Leena (the excellent Sianoa Smit McPhee) and a reputation as a bit of a cast out or a shadow in Lexi’s life. This, thankfully, doesn’t last long and Maddy is in to the squad and in with this crew. You have the wait-until-marriage high-strung Martha (the luminous Reanin Johannink), her little sister and school mascot Hanna (Amanda Grace Cooper) and football players George, Manny, Vik and Ben (Chris Petrovski, Leigh Parker, Jordan Wilson and Nicolas Morrison respectively) who round out the balanced cast. This is a world, it is worth noting, that doesn’t really seem to have adults in it. You keep expecting a few teachers or local townsfolk or whatever for color, but outside of a neighbor scene and one other scene (from memory), the film is basically devoid of adults.

Anyway, Maddy’s plans to tear this crew down run afoul pretty quickly and you have girls vs boys setup at an isolated drinking spot that breaks down into ugly fights between the genders and ultimately results in a car accident and a bunch of dead cheerleaders. Because, c’mon, that’s the title right? The relationship between Maddy and Leena (and Leena lurking nearby when it all goes down) becomes valuable to dead girls (and the story) because in a fit of passion and pain, Leena casts some kind of spell that brings them back to life. They wake the next morning in one of their houses with a host of problems. People have switched bodies, no one seems to remember exactly what happened and no normal food seems to sit right.

This gives way to two different movies from that point forward. The movie you think is going to happen and the movie that actually happens. The movie that you think is going to happen (with the girls going all Jennifer’s Body on people at random before some final showdown) happens in spits and spurts with the boys responsible firmly in the crosshairs. But another movie trots alongside the one you expect and is a more subversive, sci-fi tinted breakdown of male and female roles in these kinds of movies.

It is a compelling split – giving the viewer what they expect in one hand but going a bit gonzo-crazy in the other hand. It is a neat trick and the balance more or less works – only when the girls, as a group, are confused and disjointed does the story follow suit. Further, their unnatural return to the mortal plane inspires a slow-building-lunatic-turn by one of the jocks-turned-murderers which was a welcome introduction of a threat but a touch frantic at the same time. It is needed for the story but seems to go from first gear to fifth really fast.

It all boils down to a hard to nail down type of film that mixes a great deal of tougue-in-cheek humor, self-examination of horror clichés in a smart sort of way and a nutty, over-the-top final act that brings the magic and the dead cheerleaders and the blood and the weirdness all to a head in a satisfying kind of way. Couple this crazed mix with a fun, bouncing kind of soundtrack and very even performances cast-wide and you have a pretty fun way to spend an hour and a half.

Could it have been more crazed, more murder-y/revenge-y? Absolutely. But as a jumping off point for treating female characters with more weight than the extremes of either the brainless victim or the crazed killer roles they often assume, then I’m all for it.